Chemical Science Blog

The predicted structure of CuF

A project that ‘bubbled along in the background’ not only contradicts the inorganic textbooks, but also suggests a new material for photochemical applications. In fact, Aron Walsh from the University of Bath, UK, who worked on the calculations, describes cuprous fluoride as the ‘missing semi-conductor’ between zinc oxide and gallium nitride.

Open your inorganic text book and look up CuF – you’ll be told either it doesn’t exist, or that it was synthesised in 1933 and has a sphalerite structure. That’s what Walsh and his co-workers discovered when they were trying to do a systematic review of crystal types and what compounds form them. But modelling the compound in this structure showed that it wasn’t stable; they couldn’t explain why CuF would form the structure reported and so they did a little digging.

Read the full article in Chemistry World

Link to journal article
Prediction on the existence and chemical stability of cuprous fluoride
Aron Walsh, C. Richard A. Catlow, Raimondas Galvelis, David O. Scanlon, Florian Schiffmann, Alexey A. Sokol and Scott M. Woodley
Chem. Sci., 2012, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/C2SC20321A, Edge Article

Structure of the anionic host-guest complex

Scientists in the UK and China have encapsulated a bromine anion in a  supramolecular cavity to make a compound that could act as a model for metal-/anion-doped TiO₂.  The model could be used to find ways to improve current TiO₂-doped  photovoltaic, photocatalytic and sensing devices.

Dominic Wright from the University of Cambridge, UK, and colleagues, have incorporated a Br^– anion into a polyoxotitanate host, in which there is only very weak bonding between the bromine and the surrounding titanium oxide shell. ‘As well as providing a model for the way in which anions like Br^– are incorporated into TiO₂, purely inorganic host-guest arrangements like this are rare in their own right,’ says Wright.

Read the full article in Chemistry World

Link to journal article
Encapsulation of a ‘naked’ Br⁻ anion in a polyoxotitanate host
Yaokang Lv ,  Janina Willkomm ,  Alexander Steiner ,  Lihua Gan ,  Erwin Reisner and Dominic S. Wright
Chem. Sci., 2012, Advance Article, DOI: 10.1039/C2SC20193C

LAST CALL FOR ORAL ABSTRACTS – DEADLINE THIS FRIDAY 11TH MAY 2012

Directing Biosynthesis III (DBIII), 19 – 21 September 2012, University of Nottingham, UK

Please don’t miss this last opportunity to submit an oral abstract now to be part of a high profile conference featuring contributions from the most active groups in the UK, Europe, the USA and Japan working in this rapidly developing area.

This meeting builds on the two previous extremely successful conferences in a subject area which remains highly topical. As significant opportunities exist for engineering biosynthetic pathways in bacteria, fungi and plants for the directed biosynthesis of new natural products with new and beneficial properties. We expect the programme this year to generate a high profile event that you will not want to miss.

Confirmed Invited speakers:

Ikuro Abe, University of Tokyo, Japan
Mervyn Bibb, John Innes Centre, UK
David W. Christianson, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Christian Hertweck, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
Ben Liu, The University of Texas at Austin, USA
Professor Jim Naismith, University of St Andrews, UK
Joern Piel, University of Bonn, Germany
Professor Chris Schofield, University of Oxford, UK
David H Sherman, University of Michigan, USA
Dr David R Spring, University of Cambridge, UK
Tom Simpson, FRS, University of Bristol, UK
Yi Tang, UCLA, USA
NOW CONFIRMED – Craig Townsend, John Hopkins University, USA

A special symposium will take place within the Directing Biosynthesis III programme, recognising the achievements of three 2011 RSC award winners. Each of the winners will give a keynote lecture within the symposium.

A simple synthesis using ionic liquids reduces the cost of studying micro-porous oxide materials by NMR. This could help scientists uncover the chemistry and interactions that occur inside these materials.

The microporous structure of zeolites is used in a wide range of applications from catalysis through to gas separation however, studying interactions inside the pores is not trivial. Solid state NMR can probe the environment of 17O atoms lining the sides of the pores but unfortunately 17O has a very low natural abundance making isotopic enrichment the only practical way of conducting these experiments. The standard method of synthesising these compound uses expensive isotopically enriched water as the solvent but the majority of the enriched water ends up in bi-products or as waste solvent.

New approach allows scientists to understand what’s going on in zeolite pores

Read the full article in Chemistry World

Link to journal article
Ionothermal 17O Enrichment of Oxides using Microlitre Quantities of Labelled Water
John Griffin ,  Lucy Clark ,  Valerie Seymour ,  David Aldous ,  Daniel Dawson ,  Dinu Iuga ,  Russell Morris and Sharon Elizabeth Ashbrook
Chem. Sci., 2012, Accepted Manuscript, DOI: 10.1039/C2SC20155K