News

Wishing a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to all our Undergraduate and Postgraduate Students, Staff and friends of the Department of Chemistry.

In this fun video, Teaching Fellow Nick Barker uses a number of items, including the festive favourite Brussels sprout, to show different types of fluorescence.

Find out more about the Outreach activities in the Department of Chemistry.

A new family of organic nanotubes was reported in a recent article in Nature Communications. The group of Sébastien Perrier, in collaboration with Professor Kate Jolliffe at the University of Sydney, have designed cyclic peptide / polymer conjugates that can assemble into tubular structures based on the stacking of the cyclic peptides, and provide a tube with a sub-nm internal diameter. Attached to each of the cyclic peptides are two different types of polymers, which tend to de-mix and form a shell for the tube with two faces, and form Janus nanotubes (after the Roman god Janus who is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and the past).

Work carried out in Richard Walton’s group on the structures of polymorphs of gallium oxide has been selected as a highlight of ISIS science for 2013 in the ISIS Annual Review. ISIS is the UK’s neutron spallation source and was used to perform total neutron scattering experiments on the structures of various forms of Ga₂O₃ that were prepared in Warwick. The research was carried out by Helen Playford, then a PhD student and presently a postdoctoral scientist working at ISIS.

ISIS 2013 Annual Review:

http://www.isis.stfc.ac.uk/about-isis/annual-review/2013/isis-annual-review-201314637.html

"Structures of Uncharacterised Polymorphs of Gallium Oxide from Total Neutron Diffraction” H.Y. Playford, A. C. Hannon, E.R. Barney, and R.I. Walton, Chem. Eur. J. 19 (2013) 2803–2813

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/chem.201203359/abstract

Warwick Chemistry has played a lead role in securing funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for 2 new Centres for Doctoral training, in Molecular Analytical Science and Diamond Science and Technology, as part of the recently announced UK's largest investment in postgraduate training in engineering and physical sciences. The Universities and Science Minister, David Willetts, announced the funding of over seventy new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), spread across 24 UK universities on 22nd November.

For further information please visit:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/university_of_warwick_takes_share_of_163350m_to_train_tomorrow146s_engineers_and_scientists1

http://onlinepressoffice.tnrcommunications.co.uk/universities-funding/video 

The Tim Jones group publish work in Applied Physics Letters on replacing ITO with solution processed highly conductive PEDOT:PSS for ITO-free small molecule OPV devices.

Research, led by the Corre group, has exploited their insight into bacterial regulatory mechanisms that control natural product biosynthesis to inactivate a key transcriptional repressor gene. Consequently, a normally silent pathway was constitutively expressed in the mutant strain and novel natural products were produced, isolated and structurally characterised. This work, published as an open access edge article in Chemical Science, represents a powerful strategy for the discovery of new natural products by rational manipulation of pathway-specific regulatory elements.

Scientists have discovered that a drug which increases the risk of sudden cardiac death interacts with mistranslated protein-coding genes present in heart muscle.

International researchers have gone through the contents of their liquor cabinets to see if alcoholic drinks make good solvents for single-electron transfer living radical polymerisation (SET-LRP). And the answer is an unequivocal yes!

The RSC has announced that Peter Scott will chair the group charged with overseeing the management, use, performance and strategy of the NCDS

Three new papers from the Troisi group on the theory of charge transport appear in high profile journals. Two of them study the relation between polymer structure and charge transport and appeared in Advanced Functional Materials and Journal of the American Chemical Society, focusing respectively on semicrystalline and amorphous polymeric semiconductors. A third one, in collaboration with the Cambridge University, explores the role of dynamic fluctuations on the electronic structure of molecular semiconducting crystals and appared in Nature Materials. Seen together these papers highlight the role of theory in understanding all classes of organic semiconducting materials.

Richard Walton is co-editor of the latest volume of the Inorganic Materials Series published this week by Wiley, Local Structural Characterisation.

Scott group researchers report in Chemical Science (Open Access) that some of their helical metal flexicate complexes have high activity and selectivity against a range of cancer cell lines including cisplatin-resistant strains. The mechanism involves arresting cells in the G2/mitosis phase, and DNA binding is not necessarily involved.