News

Lara-Jane Pegg and Ross Hatton report in ACS Nano on the significance of geometric electric field enhancement effects at the electrode interfaces in organic photovoltaics.

This paper by the Sadler Group illustrates that half-sandwich ruthenium complexes upon excitation with UVA or visible light can provide a potential strategy for the design of photoactivatable ruthenium pro-drugs.

Alexis Munn, a third year PhD student in the group of Richard Walton, was awarded the Chemical Crystallography group (CCG) poster prize at the British Crystallographic Association spring meeting.

Nick Barker has been awarded a prestigious Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to teaching and learning.

Joan Soldevila (Sadler Group) won the Royal Society of Chemistry Metallomics Poster Prize at the Dalton 2012 Conference.

The Gibson Group and collaborators study synthetic glycan-lectin interactions to understand the function of anti-adhesion therapies.

Costantini and co-workers report in Advanced Materials on the fabrication of inverted crystalline membranes of sodium dodecyl sulfate by ESI deposition.

The Gibson group (in collaboration with Alison Rodger) investigate how stimuli responsive polymers can be used to modulate lipophilicity.

Results by MOAC and chemistry PhD student Angela Martino and her supervisor Alison Rodger were published this week on 4CMenB (a new meningococcal B vaccine).

The Bonlab lead by assoc. prof. Stefan Bon publishes in Polymer Chemistry how to make a DIY microfluidic device to fabricate droplets-in-droplets. They demonstrate that by using a syringe needle, plastic tubing, two glass capillaries and epoxy glue a microfluidic device can be fabricated straightforwardly that allows for the production of double emulsions, or in other words the generation of droplets-in-droplets. The device in essence is a serial combination of droplet generation by co-flow and a T-junction. To reduce potential issues with channel wetting, we established that an “obstructed” T-junction outperformed a conventional T-junction. They illustrate the versatility of our device through production of a range of polymer microcapsules, including ones that contain a waterborne dispersion of colour changing pigment, and microcapsules with compartmentalized ferrofluidic segments, that is capsules that contain more than one droplet of ferrofluid.

To read the paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/C2PY00605G

To find out more about the BonLab: http://www.bonlab.info, Twitter: Bonlab, Youtube: BonlabTV

Warwick antibiotic complexes appear in Nature Chemistry News & Views article by Janice Aldrich-Wright.

• "...a simplicity and an elegance of design that should be a source of inspiration for future studies...
• ...easily tuned to explore structure–function relationships that are crucial in biological applications...
• ...good antibiotic activity against...MRSA and E. coli as well as low toxicity to Caenorhabditis elegans.
• ...potential to develop into a family of cost-effective antibiotics."

The Gibson group have reported in Chemical Commmunications on a new route to obtain polymers containing disulfide linkages in their backbone. These linkages are appealing for drug delivery applications as they are stable in the blood stream but can be specifically degraded inside cells. Traditional controlled radical polymerizations produce all-carbon backbones which do not degrade but, in this paper, the authors demonstrate how a 2-stage polymerization process can be used to incorporate disulfides. Furthmore this allows the use of functional monomers which result in 'smart' materials capable of responding to thermal gradients.

This was published in Chemical Communications link

More information on the Gibson Group can be found here link