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Chemistry Update Newsletter 273, 27Th May 2016

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Chemistry Update Newsletter 273, 27Th May 2016 Chemistry Update Newsletter 273, 27th May 2016 Inside this Issue Calendar of Events Pratibha Gai Elected FRS 2 Graduate Research Seminar Chemistry Research Forum As Hard as Snails? 3 Date: Wednesday 1 June Date: Friday 17 June High-Affinity Iron Binding 4 Time: 4pm—5pm Time: 12pm—2pm Location: A101 MChem Project Leads to First- 5 Author Publication Bio-Based Porous Carbons Chemical InterActions Talk Symposium Hat-trick of Awards for York 6-7 Speaker: Prof Elena Rodriguez- Date: Friday 17 June Chemists Falcon Time: 9.30am—4.30pm 6reen Chemi5try Celebrates 8 Date: Monday 6 June Location: GCCE, F Block James Clark Time: 11am—12pm New Starters Location: A122 Green Chemistry Seminar Speaker: Dr Nick Gudde Clarke Group News 9 Inorganic Seminar Date: Wednesday 22 June BDC Joins Major Food 10 Speaker: Dr Arnald Grabulosa, Time: 3pm—4pm Corporations in Signing Wrap’s Universitat de Barcelona Location: F106 Ambitious Courtauld Date: Friday 10 June Commitment 2025 Time: 1pm—2pm Computational Chemistry WACL Research Presented at 11 Location: B101 Seminar the First NCAS Policy Forum Speaker: Dr David Tew, Computational Chemistry University of Bristol Chemical InterActions Seminar: 12 Seminar Date: Thursday 23 June Unconscious Bias Training for Speaker: Dr Tom Penfold, Time: 2pm—3pm Undergraduates Newcastle University Location: F106 Chemical InterActions Update 13 Date: Monday 13 June and Future Events Time: 2pm—3pm Open Days Location: A122 Dates: 24 & 25 June Green Chemistry Lab Features in TV Advert CODY Awards Chemistry Graduation Drinks A Sad Day for CIEC – But a 14 Date: Thursday 16 June Reception Good One for Valmai! Time: 4.30pm—6pm Date: Wednesday 13 July CIEC Welcomes Tom 15 Location: B101 Time: 1.30pm—3pm Frankland as Administrator Location: Chemistry Quad Tea and Cakes During Revision Long Service Awards 16 Date of Next Issue: 24th June 2016 Graduate Research Seminar 17 Prof Pratibha Gai Elected FRS Professor Pratibha Gai, JEOL Professor of Electron Microscopy, Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Physics, and founding co-director of the York JEOL Nanocentre, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in recognition of her ground-breaking work on new materials, processes and electron microscopy. This highly prestigious fellowship is the top honour in UK science, and Pratibha becomes the fifth FRS in the Department of Chemistry, joining Professors Eleanor Dodson, John Goodby, Robin Perutz and Gideon Davies. Pratibha studies dynamic chemical processes on the atomic scale. Her research focuses on the development of new nanomaterials and chemical processes for use in a range of high technology applications, including catalysis, energy, healthcare, chemicals and food coatings; and novel electron microscopies. Her process and microscopy inventions are being used worldwide. Her great innovation was to create a whole new type of electron microscope which allowed researchers to visualise reactions as they actually happen at the atomic level, in the real conditions which they would normally occur. In order to achieve this, she needed to drill a hole in the imaging lens of the microscope - something she has described as being 'like drilling a hole through a person’s heart or drilling a hole through a camera lens'. By taking this calculated risk with very specialised equipment, a whole new area of imaging was opened up, transforming the field. On hearing the news of her FRS award, Pratibha said: “I am greatly honoured and thrilled to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society and pleased that my research has received this wonderful recognition. This prestigious fellowship belongs not just to me but to all the outstanding co- researchers I have collaborated with.” Pratibha's research has previously been recognised by the L'Oreal Unesco Women in Science Award for Europe in 2013 and the Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Her career, research and personal pathway into science have also been highlighted by The Royal Society of Chemistry who named her as one of their 175 diverse Faces of Chemistry. Prior to her current York assignments, Pratibha held positions in the USA and at the University of Oxford after receiving her PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge. http://www.rsc.org/diversity/175-faces/all-faces/professor-pratibha-gai-frsc York academics elected Fellows of Royal Society Page 2 As Hard as Snails? An international study involving Dr Bea Demarchi and Dr Kirsty Penkman has shown how the hardness of calcite crystals can be tuned by incorporating different amino acids, providing new insights into the mechanical properties of inorganic / organic nanocomposites. Not only is this important for our understanding of biomineralisation, but it also opens up the possibility of using this strategy to tailor the mechanical properties of a wider range of materials. Despite being formed from brittle minerals and flexible polymers, biominerals (e.g. shells, corals, teeth) are inorganic / organic composites that exhibit remarkable strength and toughness. In order to better understand these properties, and in an attempt to control them, an international research project grew and analysed calcite crystals which had incorporated amino acids, organic molecules which have been implicated in biomineralisation. The project was led by researchers in Leeds, who grew crystals of calcite within solutions of varying amounts of 2 amino acids, while analyses at York (Bea Demarchi & Kirsty Penkman) and Cambridge showed that the amino acids were incorporated within single crystals as individual molecules. Computer simulations at Sheffield determined how the amino acid molecules fitted into the crystal lattice, which showed remarkable concordance with the experimental data from York. Researchers at Technion and the Diamond Light Source characterised the distortions formed by this incorporation of the amino acids within the crystal lattice. The hardness of the crystals were the largest yet reported in man-made synthetic calcite, and similar to those measured in biomineral calcite. A team from Cornell determined how far apart the molecules were from each other, and then showed that the greater hardness in the modified crystals (compared to pure calcite) was determined by the force needed to break the covalent bonds within the amino acids. This collaborative study therefore provides a window into how organic materials incorporated into minerals can provide such an increase in their toughness, an aspect that has been exploited by nature for the last 541 million years. The “tuning” of the mechanical properties made possible by this understanding could pave the way for using similar strategies to tailor-make other composite materials. The research, "Tuning hardness in calcite by incorporation of amino acids" was published on 2nd May in Nature Materials (http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4631.html). Page 3 High-Affinity Iron Binding High-affinity iron binding in Campylobacter jejuni, the most common cause of food poisoning in the UK Researchers in York have found that a key protein within the iron uptake system of a pathogen can scavenge the fragments of siderophores made by other bacteria to gain an advantage in the competition for essential iron. Pathogenic bacteria have evolved to synthesise molecules that enable them to acquire essential iron from their host. These siderophores display a remarkably high affinity and selectivity for iron(III). To be competitive, many bacteria rely on the production of large siderophores with six iron-binding sites, such as the siderophore enterobactin. However, a number of species, including the food-borne pathogen Campylobacter jejuni, steal siderophores from other micro-organisms and make use of their degradation products, for example by scavenging the enterobactin linear dimer. Research led by Professors Keith S. Wilson and Anne-K. Duhme-Klair in the Department of Chemistry reveal that CeuE, the periplasmic siderophore-binding protein of C. jejuni, is adapted to bind the hydrolysis product of enterobactin via two key amino-acid side chains. This adaptation allows the pathogen to benefit from the enterobactin made by other bacteria and hence gain a competitive advantage by exploiting their resources. This research was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), DOI: 10.1073/PNAS.1520829113: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/05/05/1520829113 Page 4 MChem Project Leads to First-Author Publication Tom Nicol (MChem, 2015) has had his MChem project work published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics as first author. Tom’s project was a theoretical study, supervised by Dr Seishi Shimizu, focusing on cyclodextrins. Cyclodextrins are a class of compounds made up of sugar molecules bound together in a ring (cyclic oligosaccharides). These cone-shaped molecules are hydrophobic inside and hydrophilic outside, meaning that they can form complexes with hydrophobic compounds, encapsulating other molecules within a hydrophobic cavity and hence enhancing the solubility and bioavailability of the encapsulated compounds. These properties make cyclodextrins of great interest to the pharmaceutical and food industries, among others. For example, cyclodextrins are used in the preparation of cholesterol-free products: the bulky and hydrophobic cholesterol molecule is easily lodged inside cyclodextrin rings that are then removed. Tom’s
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