News

For theory to make proper contact with experiment, we must average over a large number of geometrical configurations. For big metalloproteins like Type I copper plastocyanin and cucumber basic protein, generating the structures is too expensive for quantum chemistry. In contrast, the empirical ligand field molecular mechanics model invented by the Deeth group at Warwick can quickly generate the geometries required. Based on our structures, Nick Besley's group in Nottingham excise the active sites and use them to compute using high level QM methods the absorption and CD spectra. Agreement with experiment is impressive. See the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry B: 10.1021/jp404107j

The 11^th International Conference on Materials Chemistry (MC11) is being hosted by the Department of Chemistry this week (8-11^th July). Monday 8^th July saw the visit of two Nobel Laureates in Chemistry. Professor Dan Shechtman, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology (Nobel Prize 2011) and Professor Sir Harry Kroto FRS, Florida State University, (Nobel Prize 1996) each gave a lecture to an audience of over 500 delegates from around the world.

An inter-university collaboration between the Costantini, Jones, Bonifazi (Namur) and de Vita (King’s College) groups showed the role of deprotonation on the two dimensional assembly of novel borazine compounds on a copper substrate. The results are published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Chemistry hires three new Professors in the areas of Sustainable Chemistry and Polymers as part of the Monash-Warwick Strategic Research Alliance.

Adam Lee, Sebastien Perrier and Tom Davis are all joining the Department over the coming months.

The full details can be found at:-

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

Ken Lewtas, Chief Scientist at Infineum and visiting professor in the Department of Chemistry has been awarded the RSC Creativity in Industry Prize 2013 for "his skill in applying fundamental polymer science to industrially relevant systems, and transforming the results into profitable products."

The Gibson Group has been highlighted in a recent edition of Chemistry World - The Royal Society of Chemistry's Monthly Magazine. As part of a special article on how life survives in extreme enviroments, Dr Gibson was interviewed to discuss his team's work on polymeric mimics of antifreeze (glyco)proteins. These proteins enable fish to survive in polar oceans and synthetic mimics hold great promise in biotechnology.

Read the article here

Go to the Gibson Group's Webpages here

Follow us on twitter @LabGibson

Collaboration between the Costantini and Wills groups investigates the dissociation of a newly synthesised, novel chiral ester on metallic substrates. The products of dissociation are directly imaged by scanning tunnelling microscopy allowing for the delineation of the cleavage mechanism as seen in ChemComm.

Józef Lewandowski publishes in the Accounts of Chemical Research a review on advances in solid-state NMR relaxation methodology for probing site-specific protein dynamics. Read the article here.

The Gibson group have undertaken a detailed study into the ability of synthetic polymers to inhibit the growth of ice crystals - this is a fundmental process of incredible importance in biology (survival of extremophiles), medicine (cryoprotectection of cells/organs) and industry (preventing ice-induced damage). The Gibson group are pioneering the use of polymers as alternative to antifreeze proteins - Nature's cryoprotectants, using a combination of chemical, analytical, biological and computational methods

Read their latest paper here, in collaboration with R. Notman (CSC): http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bm400217j

Researchers in the Warwick Electrochemistry and Interfaces group have performed what's called in the American baseball jargon a 'home run' after publishing four studies in the Journal of American Chemical Society (JACS) in less than four months. The four papers demonstrate the versatility of the scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM) technique developed in this group which can be applied to various aspects of research; from probing facets and grain boundaries of pseudo-single-crystal polycrystalline electrodes to nanoscale patterning, and landing single-nanoparticles on surfaces to study catalysis.

For further details click the paper titles below:

• Pseudo-Single-Crystal Electrochemistry on Polycrystalline Electrodes: Visualizing Activity at Grains and Grain Boundaries on Platinum for the Fe2+/Fe3+ Redox Reaction
• Nanoscale Electrochemical Patterning Reveals the Active Sites for Catechol Oxidation at Graphite Surfaces
• A New View of Electrochemistry at Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite
• Landing and Catalytic Characterization of Individual Nanoparticles on Electrode Surfaces

Dr Gareth Roberts, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department has been appointed as a Ramsay Memorial Fellow to be held in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol. These fellowships are awarded to advanced students of chemical research who have shown outstanding merit. His proposed research will entail studying the ultrafast photoprotection mechanisms at work in DNA base-pairs. Congratulations Gareth!