Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Blog

The 14th Anglo-Italian Meeting on Heterocyclic Chemistry, organised by the Heterocyclic & Synthesis Group in collaboration with the Italian Chemical Society, recently took place.

It was an excellent meeting, held at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park, with around 50 participants, equally split between the two countries. There were some excellent lectures, including plenaries from:

• Professor Stephen Clark (University of Glasgow)
• Professor Sabine Flitsch (University of Manchester)
• Dr King Kuok (Mimi) Hii (Imperial College London)
• Professor Emanuela Licandro (University of Milan)
• Professor Andrea Pace (University of Palermo)
• Professor Claudio Trombini (University of Bologna)

Our congratulations go to  Susan Lepri from University of Perugia who won our poster prize.

Susan receiving her prize from Professor Chris Willis (Heterocyclic Group) and Professor Giuseppe Musumarra (Italian Chemical Society)

Congratulations to Hanna Jędrzejewska from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw for winning the Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry poster prize awarded at the 9th International Symposium on Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry (ISMSC-9) held at SIOC, Shanghai, on 7-11 June 2014.

The title of her winning poster was: Chiral self-sorting of hybrid peptidic capsules

Hanna wins a copy of the book Polymeric and Self Assembled Hydrogels : From Fundamental Understanding to Applications, signed by its author, and winner of the 2014 Cram Lehn Pedersen Prize Prof. Oren Scherman.

Hanna Jędrzejewska, OBC Poster Prize winner (right) is presented with a certificate and RSC Book, by Prof. Andrew Wilson (left) and Dr. Marie Cote (OBC Deputy Editor, centre)

On her winning work, Hanna comments:

This project aims at the synthesis of bio-compatible peptidic capsules by means of self-organization of short peptides. Such capsules can be further used for encapsulation, storage and transport of biologically relevant targets. Even though peptides are endowed with natural self-assembling properties, capsules made of short “native” peptides do not form spontaneously due to high conformational lability and tendency to form non-porous random aggregates. I have found that this disadvantage can be overcome by properly designed scaffolds that “guide” peptides into capsular structures. I have used short peptides of various chirality attached in a dynamical covalent way to the macrocyclic skeleton. This way I have obtained building blocks that spontaneously self-sort into porous peptidic capsules resembling closed β-barrels.

I’ve been working on this topic for 1 year. This research is fully supported by the PARENT/BRIDGE programme that enables the best researchers who are raising young children to return to advanced research work. The programme is financed by Foundation for Polish Science within European Regional Development Fund under the Innovative Economy Operational Programme 2007-2013.

Hanna works as a PhD student in the group of Prof. Agnieszka Szumna.

Congratulations again to Hanna – the OBC team whishes her all the very best with her research work!

From left to right: Prof. Zhanting Li, Hanna Jędrzejewska (OBC Poster Prize Winner), Prof. Andrew Wilson, Prof. Oren Scherman, Dr. Robert Eagling, Prof. Jonathan Sessler and Dr Marie Cote

Dr Richard Kelly, Managing Editor

Dr Marie Cote, Deputy Editor

The Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry team will be attending a number of conferences in 2014 and we would be delighted to meet you there.

We’re also the team behind OBC’s sister journals MedChemComm, Natural Product Reports, and the latest addition to the portfolio, Toxicology Research, so we’ll happily discuss your interdisciplinary research work. In fact, many of our authors choose to publish their research across all of these titles.

Here are just some of the conferences where you can meet us in the coming months:

GRC marine natural products 2-7 March Ventura, CA, USA – Meet Rich

Society of Toxicology annual meeting 23-27 March Phoenix, USA – Meet Marie

National Organic Symposium Trust 11-14 April Agra, India – Meet Rich

ISMSC-9 7-11 June Shanghai, China – Meet Marie

GRC Bioorganic Chemistry 8-13 June Proctor Academy, USA – Meet Rich

BOSS XIV 13-18 July Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium – Meet Marie

Fall ACS meeting 10-14 August San Francisco, USA – Meet Rich

Gregynog Young Chemists’ Workshop 10-12 September Gregynog, Wales – Meet Marie

EFMC-ISMC 7-10 September Lisbon, Portugal – Meet Rich

Eurotox 7-9 September Edinburgh, UK – Meet Marie

Let us know if you are planning on attending any of these meetings, as we would be happy to meet you there!

Congratulations to Carla Obradors and Keisuke Nakamura who received poster prizes from OBC and Chemical Science at OMCOS 17 (17th IUPAC International Symposium on Organometallic Chemistry Directed Towards Organic Synthesis).

Carla Obradors, from the group of Professor Antonio Echavarren at Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) won for a poster entitled “Role of the Counterion in Intermolecular Gold(I)-Catalyzed Cycloadditions“, while Keisuke Nakamura from the group of Professor Naoto Chatani at Osaka University presented a poster entitled “Nickel-Catalyzed Transformations Involving the Cleavage of a Carbon-Nitrogen Bond in Aniline Derivative“.

Both winners received a copy of Organometallic Chemistry, edited by Ian J S Fairlamb, Jason M Lynam. Their awards were presented by Chemical Science Associate Editor Matt Gaunt.

RSC Organic Division Poster Symposium: Deadline for poster abstracts 02 October 2013

The RSC Organic Division Poster Symposium is still accepting abstracts, but not for long. If you are a final year PhD student based in the UK/ROI and would like the opportunity to showcase your work to leading chemists in industry and academia, as well as your peers, make sure you submit your poster abstract by Wednesday 2^nd October.

The symposium will take place on Monday 2^nd December 2013, at The Chemistry Centre, Burlington House, London and there are several prizes available on the day. Alongside the £500 First Prize, there will also be a £500 “Selected by Industry” prize and two runners-up prizes of £250. And this year our headline sponsor,  F. Hoffmann-La Roche are offering a further prize of a visit to their site in Basel, Switzerland, to the First and Industry prize winners.

Reasonable travel costs will be covered for the students who are selected to present at this meeting. If you would like to find out more about the symposium and submit an abstract, visit our symposium website

We would like to thank F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Ltd. for their generous support of this event.

There’s still time to register for the second one-day symposium on Chemical and Biological Therapeutic Approaches to Neurological Disorders, on Monday 23^rd September. The meeting will feature presentations and posters, from leading experts in academia and industry, about new developments in genetics, biochemistry, pathophysiology and medicinal chemistry relating to neurological disorders. A wide range of conditions will be discussed, including Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Neurological disorders are an increasingly important global public health problem, and the cause of much long-term suffering and disability.  Currently available pharmaceuticals have been ineffective in curing many of these disorders and developing a deeper understanding of the nervous system is one of the major challenges facing scientists in the 21^st century. New research will hopefully contribute to the identification of better clinical biomarkers and medicines for diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of neurological disorders.

This one day symposium has been organised by the RSC’s Biotechnology Group with support from the Chemistry Biology Interface Division, and will be held at The Chemistry Centre, Burlington House, London. Speakers include:

Prof. Christopher Dobson, University of Cambridge
Prof. Ciaran Regan, University College Dublin
Prof. Lennart Bunch, University of Copenhagen
Prof. Peter Jenner, King’s College London
Prof. Stefan Przyborski, University of Durham
Dr. Jan Kehler, H. Lundbeck, A/S
Prof. Jonathan Corcoran, University College Dublin
Dr. Jan Passchier, Imanova Ltd.

If you would like to attend, please register here.

If you would like to find out more about this event, more information can be found on the RSC website.