News

The Jones, Hatton and Shipman groups, in collaboration with Molecular Solar Ltd., demonstrate ultra-high voltage organic multijunction solar cells suitable for direct integration with batteries suitable for portable elctronics.

The group of Richard Walton have this month co-authored three papers published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Chemical Communications on various aspects of porous metal-organic framework (MOF) materials.

Prof Greg Challis and Dr Lijiang Song, in collaboration with researchers at the John Innes Centre, report in Chemical Science that a remarkable array of novel posttranslational modifications is involved in the assembly of the bottromycin complex of antibiotics.

Costantini and co-workers publish in Physical Review B the results of a combined experimental-theoretical work that sheds light on the atomic scale-structure of MnSi thin films grown on Si(111).

Hydrogels are an important class of materials and find use accross a wide range of disciplines. Think of for example soft contact lenses, vodka jellies, and applications in medicine for example as matrixes for regenerative tissue engineering. They can be made from watersoluble polymer molecules and form a gel through crosslinking a phenonomenon that interconnects the polymer chains creating a network. When we shrink the dimensions of the hydrogel object down and disperse them as particles in water we speak of a microgel dispersion. When we decrease the size of the hydrogel particles further, down to approximately 100 nm or less, we speak of a nanogel.

Hydrogels can be crosslinked by covalent chemical bonds or through physical crosslinking. The latter process is often found in hydrogels formed from natural polymers, such as agarose and gelatine which upon cooling in water aggregate through formation of double helices. Alginate gels can be formed by ionic crosslinking with calcium ions. Synthetic hydrogels on the other hand are conveniently formed mostly through covalent crosslinking, an important class being thermoresponsive gels (often in micro- or nanogel format) made from poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide).

Stefan Bon and his team (BonLab) now for the first time show that thermoresponsive synthetic nanogels can be made using multiple hydrogen bond arrays as non-covalent crosslinks. They replaced the covalent crosslinking monomers traditionally used in the synthesis of the nanogel dispersions with a 2-ureido-4[1H] pyrimidinone (UPy) functionalized comonomer. In their work they show that the UPy groups are capable of forming strong self-complimentary quadruple hydrogen bonds, hereby linking all the polymer chains together to form a network, creating the nanogel particle.

Stefan Bon says "we are very excited about these results as it opens up a different way of thinking in how hydrogels and nanogel dispersions can be made using the traditional synthetic route of free radical polymerization. The reversibility of the hydrogen bond formation means that these materials will have exciting physical and mechanical characteristics which potentially differ from the hydrogel materials made through covalent crosslinking"

Their findings are published in Polymer Chemistry (link to the paper), a journal by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The first example of a direct aromatic nitration reaction in natural product biosynthesis has been reported by the Challis group and collaborators at Cornell University in the leading journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Ada Della Pia and Giovanni Costantini publish the Scanning Tunneling Microscopy entry for the Springer Encyclopedia of Nanotechnology, Bharat Bhushan (ed).

Congratulations to PhD student Becky Wills, selected over more than 100 nominations as a winner of the PG Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence

Professor Rachel O’Reilly wins the 2012 IUPAC-Samsung Young Polymer Scientist Award.

The O’Connor group has developed a computation which simultaneously doubles the resolution, sensitivity and mass accuracy of Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometry at no extra cost.

At a celebration lunch today, the achievements of the Warwick Chemistry Class of 2012 were recognised by the Department. This year's prize winners were: