Professor George Marston was recently asked to provide expert commentary on exciting research on the first ever direct kinetic study of the Criegee intermediate, a key intermediate generated in the reactions of ozone with alkenes. These reactions play a variety of critical roles in atmospheric chemistry, providing an important dark source of hydroxyl radicals and also generating secondary organic aerosol. Professor Marston has carried out experimental and theoretical studies of these reactions for over 15 years. His article (An Elusive Intermediate Gets Caught, Science 335, 178 (2012)) can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6065/178.full
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Press Release by the European Journal of Organic Chemistry
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EurJOC Feb 2012 Front Cover
Ian Hamley, Professor of Physical Chemistry, has been awarded a prestigious Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award.
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The award, announced by the Royal Society today (15 December), provides a five-year funding boost for Professor Hamley, as part of a scheme to keep Britain's top research scientists in the UK. The Royal Society, the world's oldest science academy, makes the awards, which are funded jointly by the Wolfson Foundation, a charitable trust supporting the sciences, and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
Professor Hamley is planning to use the award to continue his groundbreaking research into peptides, tiny parts of proteins that occur naturally and have an important biological function in the human body.
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Work by Professors Howard Colquhoun and Christine Cardin from the Department of Chemistry in Reading has been selected for the University Life Science Research Output prize.
Publication in CentAUR Repository
Zhu, Z., Cardin, C. J., Gan, Y. and Colquhoun, H. M.Nature Chemistry, 2 (8). pp. 653-660. ISSN 1755-4330
DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.699
Fibrillar superstructure from extended nanotapes formed by a collagen-stimulating peptide
High end anti-wrinkle skincare creams contain active ingredients to stimulate collagen production to reduce the appearance of aging. We investigated the self-assembly of a peptide amphiphile used as an ingredient in these creams. For the first time, the structure was revealed, using x-ray scattering and electron microscopy methods, to comprise extended fibrils with a nanoscale tape morphology. Understanding this unexpected structure and controlling it is expected to be important in formulating these systems to further enhance collagen production. This is the subject of ongoing research.
This Communication was rated as a Hot Article by the high impact journal ChemComm) and the work was featured in New Scientist.
Castelletto, V., Hamley, I. W., Perez, J., Abezgauz, L. and Danino, D. (2010) Chemical Communications, 46. pp. 9185-9187. ISSN 1359-7345
DOI: 10.1039/c0cc03793a
Relationship between phonons and thermal expansion in Zn(CN02)
Double-Gyroid Morphology of a Polystyrene-block-Poly (ferrocenylethylmethylsilane) Diblock Copolymer
Titanocene anticancer complexes and their binding mode of action to human serum albumin
Infrared Absorption Spectra, Radiative Efficiencies and global warming potentials of perfluorocarbons
Global and Local Expression of Chirality in Serine on the Cu{110} Surface
Establishing a molecular-level understanding of enantioselectivity and chiral resolution at organic-inorganic interfaces is a key challenge in heterogeneous catalysis. As a model system the group of Georg Held from the Department of Chemistry in Reading together with collaborators from Aarhus, Denmark, investigated the adsorption geometry of serine on Cu{110} using a combination of spectroscopic and crystallographic techniques. They found that the chirality of enantiopure chemisorbed layers, where serine is in its deprotonated (anionic) state, is expressed at three levels: (i) the molecules form dimers whose orientation depends on the molecular chirality, (ii) dimers of L and D enantiomers aggregate into superstructures with different chiral lattices, which are mirror images of each other, and (iii) small islands have elongated shapes with the dominant direction depending on the chirality of the molecules. Dimer and superlattice formation can be explained in terms of intra and inter-dimer bonds involving carboxylate, amino and OH groups. The stability of the layers increases with the size of ordered islands. In racemic mixtures they observe chiral resolution into small ordered enantiopure islands, which appears to be driven by the formation of homochiral dimer subunits and the directionality of inter-dimer hydrogen bonds. These islands show the same enantiospecific elongated shapes as in low-coverage enantiopure layers.
Eralp, T., Shavorskiy, A., Zheleva, Z. V., Held, G., Kalashnyk, N., Ning, Y. and Linderoth, T. R. , Langmuir 2010, 26(24), 18841-18851;
DOI: 10.1021/la1036772
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was recently asked to provide expert commentary on exciting research on the first ever direct kinetic study of the Criegee intermediate, a key intermediate generated in the reactions of ozone with alkenes. These reactions play a variety of critical roles in atmospheric chemistry, providing an important dark source of hydroxyl radicals and also generating secondary organic aerosol. Professor Marston has carried out experimental and theoretical studies of these reactions for over 15 years. His article (An Elusive Intermediate Gets Caught, Science 335, 178 (2012)) can be found at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6065/178.full
European Journal of Organic Chemistry cites Professor Laurence Harwood and his team in their latest Americium-selective ligand work