Teaching life a new trick: Bacteria make boron-carbon bonds
Nature. Lead authors of the report are Jennifer Kan and Xiongyi Huang, postdoctoral scholars in Arnold’s laboratory. “We have given life a whole new building block that it did not have before,” says Arnold, who is also the director of the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center. “This is just the beginning. We’ve opened […]
Marie Curie, the migrant chemist
150 years after Marie Curie’s birth, Mike Sutton delves into her life and research When Maria Skłodowska was born, 150 years ago this month, her homeland had long since ceased to be an independent sovereign state. During the previous century, Russia had annexed most of Poland’s territory, with the rest divided between Prussia and Austria. […]
The origins of chemical industry? How the mines of Zewar transformed zinc production
How excavations in India have changed our view on industrialization One of the features of the Industrial Revolution was the translation of scientific laboratory techniques to viable industrial processes. This is usually regarded as a quintessentially European phenomenon – a product of the Age of Reason, with endeavours based on the results of reproducible scientific […]
(‒)-Pavidolide B
An innovative approach to making five-membered carbon rings makes for a strikingly short synthesis There is no shortage of good ways to make 6-membered rings. Perhaps the most general and powerful is the venerable Diels–Alder [4+2] cycloaddition, an amazingly useful reaction that’s simple enough to teach to undergraduates, yet still a common sight in the […]
How Pasteur’s Artistic Insight Changed Chemistry
How Pasteur’s Artistic Insight Changed Chemistry Crystals of tartaric acid. Louis Pasteur was studying a version of this byproduct of wine production, paratartaric acid, when he articulated the property of chirality. CreditPasieka/Science Source If you’ve ever had milk, you’re probably familiar with the work of Louis Pasteur, the 19th-century French chemist and biologist. He prevented diseases, […]
John D. Roberts Dies at 98; He Revolutionized the Field of Organic Chemistry
John D. Roberts at M.I.T. in 1947. He played a crucial role in the explosive growth of physical organic chemistry, a field that studies the reactivity of biological compounds. Credit M.I.T. John D. Roberts, an organic chemist who pioneered the use of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and other techniques to reveal the structures of molecules […]
First boron–tellurium double bond captured
A rarity among rarities, the first molecule with a boron–tellurium double bond – and one of the few boron–tellurium compounds in existence – has been made by chemists in Germany. Tellurium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth’s crust, as scarce as platinum. The heavy chalcogen is mostly used in iron alloys and […]
Who is the greatest chemist of all time?
How we compare science superstars leads to important questions for chemistry Everyone wants to know who’s the best. Human achievement is built on league tables and rankings, healthy competition or historic inspiration. We like to pretend that we don’t really care about anyone else, but our entire way of life is built on superlatives. We […]
Zooming in on enzyme that repairs DNA damage from UV rays
A research team at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to study an enzyme found in plants, bacteria and some animals that repairs DNA damage caused by the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) light rays. By studying this enzyme, called DNA photolyase, with the ultrabright and ultrafast […]
New X-ray spectroscopy explores hydrogen-generating catalyst
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a single-cell algae and Desulfovibrio desulfuricans, a bacterium. In both cases, their hydrogenase enzymes have an active site with two iron atoms. “Among hydrogenases, [FeFe] hydrogenase has the highest turnover rate (molecular hydrogen production rate) and therefore has a potential role in the future hydrogen economy, either by a direct use or by […]
What’s left isn’t always right in total synthesis
(+)-Frondosin B is part of a family of marine sesquiterpenes found in underwater sponges that exhibit anti-inflammatory properties and have potential applications in anticancer and HIV therapy. Starting with Samuel Danishefsky’s route in 2001,2 there have been 5 total syntheses of (+)-frondosin B. However, due to a discrepancy in the optical rotation of the final product during Dirk […]
Acene synthesis sets new record for twisted molecules
Twisting acenes by introducing sterically crowded groups has produced a family of molecules dubbed twistacenes. For a long time, these molecules remained practically unexplored, mostly because their synthesis is extremely challenging. Now, a team of chemists report the synthesis of decatwistacene, which is the longest of its kind.1 The molecule also exhibits a record torsion angle […]
