News

Józef Lewandowski in collaboration with Lyndon Emsley (EPFL, Lausanne/ENS-Lyon) and Martin Blackledge (IBS, Grenoble) reports in Science on a direct observation of hierarchy of protein and solvent motions in protein conformational energy landscape. The findings of the study employing a series of variable temperature magic angle spinning multinuclear NMR relaxation measurements on a nanocrystalline protein reconcile divergent interpretations from techniques that are individually sensitive to dynamic phenomena occurring on different time scales and at different locations in protein-solvent systems. Read more in Science.

'It appears that a series of catalysts developed in the Warwick Chemistry department have the ability to achieve the impossible: 'Impossible Ketone and Imine Reductions Made Possible by the Ruthenium Tethered Catalyst' reads the headline of the Johnson Matthey (JM) advert on the back of the April 2015 issue of Chemistry World. The tethered ruthenium catalysts described in the advert were first developed and reported by Professor Martin Wills and his group, and have since been developed extensively at Warwick and adopted by companies worldwide, including JM.

Dr. Luke Rochford and Prof. Tim Jones along with Alex Ramadan and collaborators from Imperial College London publish in Advanced Materials Interfaces on the use of solution-grown copper iodide crystals as substrates for templated growth of a nonplanar phthalocyanine molecule using organic molecular beam deposition.

Sebastien Perrier has been awarded a €1.7 million Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council for his work on tubular supramolecular polymers. These structures, pioneered by the Perrier group, are based on the assembly of cyclic peptide/polymer conjugates into nanotubes, held together by supramolecular interactions. They have a range of unique physical and chemical properties, and the ERC grant will allow the group to develop these systems further as drug delivery vectors. Recent work has shown that they can act efficiently to deliver anticancer drugs to cancer cells and enhance the drug activity, and the 5 years’ ERC funding will support further studies in this area.

Dave Haddleton has recently been given the PTN (Polymer Technology Netherlands) 2015 “Medema Award”.

The annual prize is awarded to prolific polymer scientists who interact, or have close ties, with polymer research in the Netherlands. The award is named after the late PTN chairman, Dick Medema, who was the former R&D director at Shell.

The list of previous award winners can be found at: http://www.ptn.nu/award/index.htm.

Vincent Poon, a PhD student in Christophe Corre’s group, has attended Parliament to present his research on exploiting soil bacteria to unlock the production of novel antibiotics. Vincent presented to a range of politicians and a panel of expert judges, as part of SET for Britain on Monday 9th March.

For further information about the event, please visit http://www.setforbritain.org.uk/.

Sarah-Jane Richards, of the Gibson Group, has been awarded an IAS Fellowship. This will enable to further her work into new methods for the detection and neutralisation of pathogens developed during her PhD (e.g. Chem Sci 2014 5, 1621, Angew. Chem.2012, 51, 7812). This fellowship will enable her to translate these findings into more sophisticated sensory systems.

John Sidda, a PhD student in Christophe Corre’s group, has been awarded an Early Career Fellowship by the Institute of Advanced Study. During his PhD studies conducted between the Department of Chemistry and School of Life Sciences, his research has focussed on regulatory mechanisms involved in bacterial natural product biosynthesis, leading to the discovery of new Streptomyces venezuelae natural products (Chem. Sci. 2014, 5, 86-89). His tenure as an IAS Early Career Fellow will allow him to develop the methods used for natural product discovery in other Streptomyces species.

Paul Sullivan and Luke Rochford, in collaboration with researchers at CSIRO in Melbourne, Australia, report in Chemical Communications on a new non-fullerene acceptor material for evaporated organic solar cells.

Zoe Ayres and Sarah-Jane Richards (from Electrochemistry and Gibson Groups) won the main and runner up prizes in the first #RSCAnalyticalPoster competition. The competition was entirely based on twitter, with the aim of creating a poster, which succinctly summarised an application or method in analytial science. The competition attracted signficant interest with > 1k tweets, to an audience >300k and >1 million impressions.

Sarah-Jane won the main prize with her poster 'Cholera and Sugars' and Zoe a runner-up prize with her poster using diamond electrochemical Sensors.

Dr Matthew Gibson has been awarded the RSC/Dextra Medal for Carbohydrate Science. This award, which is sponsored by Dextra Laboratories, was founded in 1970. It is presented to a scientist in the early/mid stage of their career for meritorious work in carbohydrate chemistry that has largely been conducted in the UK.

Matt will present a lecture, and recieve the medal at the joint RSc/COST MultiglycoNano Meeting in Bangor, Wales, in April.

To read more about the GibsonGroup's research visit their webpage.

Other colleagues were nominated for an award and enjoyed the opportunity of celebrating with Sharon.