News

An evolutionary study of enzymes that produce and deactivate Vitamin A suggests that Vitamin A was “invented” not by animals, as generally thought, but by cyanobacteria. This is a surprising finding with respect to standard models of evolution. Vitamin A is medically important and cyanobacteria are ecologically very significant so the research may have impact both on healthcare and on the environment (Millard, Scanlan,* Gallagher, Marsh & Taylor* Mol. Biosyst. 2014)

Lewandowski group in collaboration with Ladizhansky and Brown (U. of Guelph) groups have characterised site-specific molecular motions of a 7-helix membrane protein within a lipid bilayer using solid-state NMR measurements. Read the article in JACS. 

The Gibson Group, in collaboration with the Medical School, have demonstrated a new way to cryopreserve donor blood using a synthetic polymer which mimics Antifreeze Proteins found in Arctic Cod.

Read the paper here

Professor Sebastien Perrier, Department of Chemistry, has received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has announced the appointment of 21 new holders. Professor Mohan Balasubramanian, Warwick Medical School, has also received the prestigious award this year.

The newly appointed award holders are working on a wide range of projects. Professor Sebastien Perrier’s work will focus on Functional soft nanotubes from molecular engineering.

Research carried out in the Electrochemistry and Interfaces Group lead by Prof Unwin recently appeared as a JACS highlighted communication. The study by Paul Kirkman et al utilised the electrochemical patterning of diazonium compounds to chemically functionalise sp2 carbon materials in a systematic and controlled way. This microscale modification method can be particularly attractive as a means to generate a band gap in graphene opening up the prospects of graphene-based electronic devices.

'Spatial and Temporal Control of the diazonium modification of sp2 carbon surfaces', Paul M. Kirkman, Aleix G. Güell,* Anatolii S. Cuharuc, and Patrick R. Unwin*, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2014, 136 (1), pp 36-39

DOI: 10.1021/ja410467e

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.