News

Nanodiamonds have been found to help loosen crystallized fat from surfaces in a project led by Dr Andrew Marsh at University of Warwick. The tiny carbon particles transform the ability of surfactants to shift dirt in cold water, findings that could bring eco friendly low temperature laundry cycles.

The research is published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces and highlighted in the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, 26 June.

Nanodiamond Promotes Surfactant-Mediated Triglyceride Removal from a Hydrophobic Surface at or below Room Temperature Xianjin Cui, Xianping Liu, Andrew S. Tatton, Steven P. Brown, Haitao Ye, and Andrew Marsh ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/am300560z

Team Stavros, in collaboration with Dr Martin Paterson at Heriot-Watt University, publishes work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. They intricately map the ultrafast photochemistry occurring in aminobenzene (aniline), demonstrating that it is an excellent model for better understanding highly efficient mechanisms in the DNA base guanine which prevent toxic UV induced photodecomposition. Read the article here.

Unwin et al. recently reported on electron transfer at basal plane graphite which featured as a ‘Very Important Paper’ and on the inside cover of Angewandte Chemie. See http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201200564/abstract for more details.

The Gibson group report in Angewandte Chemie: Here they probe the accessibility of carbohydrate binding sites in bacterial toxins, exemplified with the toxin produced by Vibrio cholerae, the causative agent of cholera. Read the article here

Two members of the Gibson group have won poster prizes. Robert Deller won 1st Place at the RSC younger Members symposium (at Uni. Nottingham) for his work on Peptidomimetic Cryopreservation Agents. Lucienne Otten won 3rd place at the Systems Biology Annual Conference for her work on Label Free Analysis of Protein-Carbohydrate Interactions.

A new class of photoactive Pt(IV) anti-cancer prodrugs is under development in the Sadler group. But what happens when they are irradiated and how do the photoproducts interact with double-stranded DNA? Via a combination of new experimental data coupled with Ligand Field Molecular Dynamics simulations carried out in the Deeth group, we have modelled the DNA distortion caused by a putuative trans-Pt^II(pyridine)₂ lesion. See: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ic3005745 for all the details.

The Challis group and collaborators at the John Innes Centre report in the journal Chemical Science on the genomics-driven discovery of a novel polyketide alkaloid with an unprecedented structure. Incorporation experiments with stable isotope-labelled precursors combined with bioinformatics analyses were used to deduce the likely biosynthetic pathway for the natural product. See http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/sc/c2sc20410j for further details.

Macpherson and Unwin and co-workers Challenge the Current Consensus on the Electrochemical Properties of Nanotubes as featured in "Chemistry World" http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2012/06/challenging-consensus-nanotube-electrochemistry and Chemical Communications http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/cc/c2cc32890a.

Congratulations to Nicholas Ballard who won the best poster prize at the Unilever SM&PS student poster session held at Unilever Port Sunlight.

Pat Unwin and Rachel O’Reilly win 2012 Royal Society of Chemistry Awards in recognition of significant contributions to their research fields

Warwick and IBM scientists make and image a 1.2 nanometer wide molecule that looks like a well known sporting logo.

A study published in the latest issue of Nature Chemistry led by researchers from the O'Reilly group details a new biomimetic approach to polymer synthesis.