News

The Tim Jones group have collaborated with the Chris McConville group in physics to publish work in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C, exploring the optimisation of a solution processed vanadium oxide hole-extracting layer for organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells.

Daniel Phillips, a 2nd year PhD student in the Gibson Group, won the prize for best poster at the RSC Postgraduate Nanoscience Symposium held at the University of Birmingham.

Read some of Dan's publications in Chem Commun and Biomacromolecules

The Lewandowski group in collaboration with scientists from IBS Grenoble, ENS Lyon and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign report in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters one of the first comparisons of 200 ns MD simulation of a protein in a crystalline form with dynamic parameters obtained from solid-state NMR measurements. This study tests the accuracy of commonly applied procedures for the interpretation of experimental solid-state relaxation data in terms of dynamic modes and time scales.

Read the full article

The Hatton group report in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces the fabrication, exceptional properties, and application of 8 nm thick Cu, Ag, Au, and Cu/Ag bilayer electrodes on flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) substrates. These electrodes have a sheet resistance of ≤14 Ω sq^–1, are exceptionally robust and can be rapidly thermally annealed at 200 °C to reduce their sheet resistance to ≤9 Ω sq^–1. The power conversion efficiency of 1 cm² organic photovoltaics (OPVs) employing 8 nm Ag and Au films as the hole-extracting window electrode exhibit performance comparable to those on indium–tin oxide, with the advantage that they are resistant to repeated bending through a small radius of curvature and are chemically well-defined. OPVs employing Cu and bilayer Cu:Ag electrodes exhibit inferior performance due to a lower open-circuit voltage and fill factor. Measurements of the interfacial energetics made using the Kelvin probe technique provide insight into the physical reason for this difference. The results show how coinage metal electrodes offer a viable alternative to ITO on flexible substrates for OPVs and highlight the challenges associated with the use of Cu as an electrode material in this context.

The Gibson group with collaborators at ETH Zurich report in Advanced Functional Materials on how synthetic polymers tethered to the surface of an enzyme can produce a 'molecular sieving' effect. Polymer-Protein conjugates are widely studied for their pharmaceutical applications, but the phase behaviour of the polymers has not be probed in detail previously. These results open the door to 'smart' PEGylation of proteins with selective permeability properties.

Read the full paper here

The Hatton group report in Advanced Materials a low cost window electrode for organic photovoltaics which simultaneously removes the requirement for conducting oxide and conventional low work function electrodes and functions as a sink for oxygen/water in the heart of the device. Remarkably the functionality of this electrode, which is based on a 7.8 nm nanostructured Cu:Al film, improves upon in-situ oxidation as demonstrated in bulk heterojunction organic photovoltaics.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201203280/abstract

The Hatton group report in Advanced Energy Materials a lithography-free method for the fabrication of optically-thin plasmon-active metal window electrodes with a dense array of nano-sized apertures on glass and plastic substrates. These remarkably robust, low sheet resistance electrodes simultaneously concentrate light and extract charge carriers in both polymer and vacuum deposited organic photovoltaics, and outperform indium-tin oxide electrodes on flexible substrates.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aenm.201200502/abstract

Dr Joanna Geden, who is currently a Daphne Jackson Fellow in the Department, was awarded the prize for best poster at the Daphne Jackson Research Conference at the University of Bath on 24^th October 2012.

The O’Connor and Tosin groups have published work on the use of high mass accuracy tandem mass spectrometry for characterising the structures of polyketides, including erythromycin A, lasalocid A and iso-lasalocid A. They report in Analytical Chemistry on the use of Collision Activated Dissociation (CAD) and Electron Induced Dissociation (EID) as tools for determining structural information on these types of molecules. EID was shown to cause greater fragmentation of the compounds, complementary to that obtained using CAD, leading to more detailed structural information being obtained. These techniques were also combined in multistage mass spectrometry experiments, in order to use the fragmentation patterns to distinguish between lasalocid A and its isomer, iso-lasalcoid A. This work illustrates the potential of these tools and will be applied to identifying unknown polyketides and their biosynthetic intermediates.

The full article can be found at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac3022778

Dr Rebecca Notman has been awarded a prestigious 5-year Royal Society University Research Fellowship starting October 2012 to pursue a research project on “Modelling the Lipid Layers of the Human Skin Barrier”.

Sadler and Stavros groups in collaboration with Prof Martin Paterson at Heriot-Watt University, publish work in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The work describes the first demonstration of a 2-photon activated, square planar platinum (II) complex. The enhanced photolabilization demonstrated may be useful in the design of novel photoactivatable platinum chemotherapeutic agents in situations where deep tissue penetration is needed. Read the article here.

The Sadler Group report in JACS a method for switching off the cytotoxicity of a photoactivated platinum(IV) diazido complex in the A2780 human ovarian cancer cell line.