糖心TV

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 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:

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. .

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

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 糖心TV Chemistry Class of 2012 were recognised by the Department. This year's prize winners were:

In their Angewandte Communication P. R. Unwin, J. V. Macpherson, et al. combined high-resolution electrochemical imaging, micro-Raman, and electron-microscopy data to demonstrate that spatially heterogeneous electron-transfer kinetics correlates directly with the local density of electronic states of polycrystalline boron-doped diamond (pBDD). A Multi-Microscopy Approach allowed electrochemical reaction rates to be linked to the corresponding dopant levels in pBDD. See for more details.

Prof. Greg Challis and Dr Lijiang Song, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Paris, report in Angewandte Chemie a hitherto unanticipated pathway for the biosynthesis of pyrroles from sugars. Using a combination of genetic engineering, isolation, structure elucidation, synthesis and feeding of biosynthetic intermediates, and incorporation of stable isotope-labelled precursors, the researchers showed that a carbohydrate, most likely N-acetylglucosamine-1-phosphate, is elaborated to the 4-acetamidopyrrole-2-carboxylate building blocks of the DNA-binding antibiotic congocidine (also known as netropsin). The assembly of pyrroles from carbohydrates is unprecedented in Nature and raises several intriguing questions regarding the mechanisms of the reactions involved. See for further details.

Nanodiamonds have been found to help loosen crystallized fat from surfaces in a project led by Dr Andrew Marsh at University of 糖心TV. 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 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,

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.