Monthly Archives: April 2013

2010 Knox Graduate Receives National Science Foundation Award

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Edward Dale, a 2010 Knox College graduate, has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.

As a fellow, he will receive a three-year annual stipend of $30,000, a $12,000 cost-of-education allowance for tuition and fees, and opportunities for international research and professional development. He and other fellows also have the freedom to conduct their own research at any accredited U.S. institution of graduate education.

NSF received more than 13,000 applications for the 2013 competition. Fellowships were offered to 2,000 individuals.

Dale (in photo above with Knox Professor of Chemistry Diana Cermak, and in photo below at one of Knox College's traditional robot competitions) graduated summa cum laude from Knox, double-majoring inchemistry andbiochemistry and earningCollege Honors for his research project, "Synthesis of Optically Active -Aminophosphonic Acids." He was elected toPhi Beta Kappa as a junior and received the 2010 Harris Award in Chemistry.

Now a graduate student at Northwestern University, Dale is pursuing various molecular research projects. He briefly described a couple of them:

A native of Roscoe, Illinois, Dale said his childhood toys and a love for puzzles led him to this sort of research. "The first article I read related to this area was actually for a short literature review for [Knox Associate Professor of Chemistry Thomas Clayton's] inorganic chemistry class," he said, remembering that he was "immediately hooked."

Being a student at Knox "shaped me in so many ways," said Dale, who co-authored a Journal of Chemical Crystallography article with Clayton and three other collaborators. "Knox was an environment that opened new ideas and ways of thinking to me."

"I really owe a lot to the faculty at Knox," he added. (Photo at left: Edward Dale and his wife, Natalie.)

The influence of Professor of ChemistryDiana Cermak "helped alter my trajectory from medical school (which I now know would have been a mistake) toward graduate school and ignited a passion for research that I didn't know existed through theMcNair Fellowship and an Honors Project."

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2010 Knox Graduate Receives National Science Foundation Award

First Enzyme-Based Memory Created in the Lab

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Some clever biochemistry has led to the worlds first enzyme-based memory capable of learning, say biochemists

Electronic processors are highly efficient at certain types of computation. For example, a standard PC can vastly outperform any human at arithmetic. However, computer scientists have long been fascinated by the ability of biological systems to do tasks, such as face recognition, at speeds and a power efficiency that put the most powerful supercomputers to shame.

Clearly, biology is able of computing in ways that traditional processors have failed to capture, which is why there is a significant interest in unconventional methods of computing that explore new ways of processing information.

One form of unconventional computing is biochemical and involves using molecules to encode information and using chemical reactions to process it. Nature has developed highly complex machinery for doing this so much of the focus has been on exploiting biological molecules for this task, using proteins, DNA and the like.

Today,Vera Bocharova and a few pals at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, say they ve used a set of enzymes to create a memory system that can learn to produce a specific output given a certain input. They says this system can even unlearn again later. We report the first realization of a simple variant of associative memory in an enzymaticbiochemical process, they say.

The theory is straightforward. Imagine the system as a black box that can have two chemical inputs and a chemical output. This output is a chemical called oxidised3,3,5,5-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB).

The black box produces oxidised TMB when it receives input 1 but the goal is to make it produce oxidised TMB when it receives input 2. In other words, Bocharova and co aim to teach the system to produce oxidised TMB when it senses input 2.

The trick theyve perfected is one of chemistry. Input 1 alone produces oxidised TMB. But Bocharova and co have designed the chemistry so that when input 1 and 2 are added together, the result is a chemical environment that is ripe for the production of oxidised TMBbut only when they add more of input 2.

So having added input 1 and 2 togetherhaving trained the systemit is now ready to produce oxidised TMB when it receives input 2 alone. The system has learned to respond to input 2.

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First Enzyme-Based Memory Created in the Lab

A (metal-organic) framework for progress?

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History is peppered with stories of scientists simultaneously making discoveries. One of the most famous was, of course, when Newton and Leibniz independently developed calculus, but this also occurred for other huge scientific discoveries, such as Darwin and Wallace both coming up with the theory of evolution and, in chemistry, Scheele and Priestley separately discovering oxygen.

So, perhaps I should not have been so surprised when I saw two papers, published around the same time, both reporting the discovery of the exact same metal-organic framework (MOF).

Two groups both independently created the same MOF using the same linkers

But is this coincidence something to be expected? A curious indication of the massive popularity MOFs have gained? It’s a fame that is well deserved. Their potential is huge due to their remarkable porosity, and they are being explored for applications like gas storage, catalysis, gas separation and sensors.

However, I realised I knew next to nothing about their origin. They have a structure that’s not dissimilar to zeolites, but zeolites occur in nature (that’s how we discovered them), whereas MOF-like structures do not. Were they somehow inspired by zeolites? Were they specifically designed for their applications?

I feared that it might be one of those things that have been forgotten, but a little digging proved me wrong. Although some reports suggest that there’s more than one story, it looks like they were made because, like a lot of great innovation, someone said it couldn’t be done.1

The majority of molecules are zero- or one-dimensional. Zero-dimensional being your bog standard small molecules, while one-dimensional are periodic structures like polymers. It’s harder, however, to make two-dimensional periodic molecules and, at the time, people were pretty certain that three-dimensional molecules were impossible.

The crystal structure of the MOF

So, MOFs were invented to prove a point. Despite scientists knowing of their existence since the 1950s,2 no one really explored what they could be used for until 40 years later (people were still questioning the stability of these materials even a decade ago), when researchers such as Omar Yaghi realised that these things had huge surface areas and began to wonder to what might be done with them.3

Since then, the amount of MOF work has grown almost exponentially and, as Hupp et al’s paper suggests, we’re perhaps now at a stage where their use in vehicles (to replace petrol with methane gas) isn’t too far off.

In energy conscious times, this will provide a bit of relief for countries that have to import their oil and could hopefully also drive petrol prices down. Of course, burning gas should also be cleaner than petrol too.

One final consideration. Hupp’s team note that gas-powered cars are already running in the US, although they don’t use MOFs. In a country that calls ‘petrol’ ‘gas’ does anyone else foresee some sitcom-esque misunderstandings at ‘gas stations’?

Yuandi Li

References

1 M O’Keeffe, Chem. Soc. Rev., 2009, 38, 1215

2 J H Rayner and H M Powell, J. Chem. Soc., 1952, 319

3 O M Yaghi et al, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 1997, 119, 2861

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Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2013/04/24/a-metal-organic-framework-for-progress/