Archive for the ‘Interesting chemistry’ Category
Friday, December 11th, 2015
You might have noticed the occasional reference here to the upcoming centenary of the publication of Gilbert N. Lewis’ famous article entitled “The atom and the molecule“.[1] A symposium exploring his scientific impact and legacy will be held in London on March 23, 2016, exactly 70 years to the day since his death. A list of the speakers and their titles is shown below; there is no attendance fee, but you must register as per the instructions below.
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References
- G.N. Lewis, "THE ATOM AND THE MOLECULE.", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 38, pp. 762-785, 1916. https://doi.org/10.1021/ja02261a002
Tags:Alan Dronsfield, Clark Landis, Durham, France, Gilbert N. Lewis, John Nicholson, Julia Contreras-Garcia, Liverpool, London, Michael Mingos, Nick Greeves, organic chemist, Oxford, Patrick Coffey, professor, Robin Hendry, Royal Society of Chemistry Historical Group, United Kingdom, United States
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Thursday, December 10th, 2015
The layout of floor 2 of the chemistry department here contains a number of small rooms which function as tutorial areas. Each has a (non-interactive) whiteboard used by students and tutors for, inter-alia, thought-showering. It was in one such room that I found myself with three colleagues this monday afternoon. We soon all sensed something not quite right about the room; it slowly dawned that the whiteboard was entirely devoid of thoughts (it is normally left adorned with chemical hieroglyphics). Before we departed, one of our number crept up to the board and showered the following (the red bit only followed by a ?; thanks Willie!). The chemistry equivalent you might say of Guerrilla gardening. The product shown in blue below is for your benefit here. It is an example of a double fragmentation reaction; by an odd coincidence following on nicely from the previous post.
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Saturday, November 28th, 2015
In answering tutorial problems, students often need skills in deciding how much time to spend on explaining what does not happen, as well as what does. Here I explore alternatives to the mechanism outlined in the previous post to see what computation has to say about what does (or might) not happen.
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Tags:animation, Chemical bond, condensation, Demjanov rearrangement, energy, Rearrangement reactions, Tiffeneau–Demjanov rearrangement
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Monday, November 23rd, 2015
This reaction emerged a few years ago (thanks Alan!) as a tutorial problem in organic chemistry, in which students had to devise a mechanism for the reaction and use this to predict the stereochemical outcome at the two chiral centres indicated with *. It originates in a brief report from R. B. Woodward’s group in 1973 describing a prostaglandin synthesis,[1] the stereochemical outcome being crucial. Here I take a look at this mechanism using computation.
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References
- R.B. Woodward, J. Gosteli, I. Ernest, R.J. Friary, G. Nestler, H. Raman, R. Sitrin, C. Suter, and J.K. Whitesell, "Novel synthesis of prostaglandin F2.alpha.", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 95, pp. 6853-6855, 1973. https://doi.org/10.1021/ja00801a066
Tags:activation energy, animation, energy, learning tool
Posted in Interesting chemistry, reaction mechanism | 4 Comments »
Friday, October 23rd, 2015
Steve Bachrach on his own blog has commented on a recent article[1] discussing the structure of the trimer of fluoroethanol. Rather than the expected triangular form with three OH—O hydrogen bonds, the lowest energy form only had two such bonds, but it matched the microwave data much better. Here I explore this a bit more.
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References
- J. Thomas, X. Liu, W. Jäger, and Y. Xu, "Unusual H‐Bond Topology and Bifurcated H‐bonds in the 2‐Fluoroethanol Trimer", Angewandte Chemie International Edition, vol. 54, pp. 11711-11715, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201505934
Tags:Atoms in molecules, chemical bonding, Diagram, Hydrogen bond, low energy structure, lowest energy form, microwave, Steve Bachrach
Posted in Interesting chemistry | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, October 14th, 2015
In Jingdezhen an Imperial Kiln was built in 1369 to produce porcelain that was “white as jade, thin as paper, bright as a mirror and tuneful as a bell”. It’s the colours of the glazes that caught my eye, achieved by a combination of oxidative and reductive firing in the kiln, coupled with exquisite control of the temperature.
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Posted in Historical, Interesting chemistry | No Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2015
This comes to you from China, and the city of Suzhou. To set the scene, cities in China have a lot of motorbikes. Electric ones. With their own speed units, a % of Panda speed. 
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Thursday, October 1st, 2015
A fascinating re-examination has appeared[1] of a reaction first published[2] in 1960 by Wittig and then[3] repudiated by him in 1964 since it could not be replicated by a later student. According to the new work, the secret to a successful replication seems to be the presence of traces of a nickel catalyst (originally coming from e.g. a nickel spatula?). In this recent article[1] a mechanism for the catalytic cycle is proposed. Here I thought I might explore this mechanism using calculations to see if any further insights might emerge.
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References
- S.A. Künzi, J.M. Sarria Toro, T. den Hartog, and P. Chen, "Nickel‐Catalyzed Cyclopropanation with NMe<sub>4</sub>OTf and <i>n</i>BuLi", Angewandte Chemie International Edition, vol. 54, pp. 10670-10674, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201505482
- V. Franzen, and G. Wittig, "Trimethylammonium‐methylid als Methylen‐Donator", Angewandte Chemie, vol. 72, pp. 417-417, 1960. https://doi.org/10.1002/ange.19600721210
- G. Wittig, and D. Krauss, "Cyclopropanierungen bei Einwirkung von <i>N</i>‐Yliden auf Olefine", Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie, vol. 679, pp. 34-41, 1964. https://doi.org/10.1002/jlac.19646790106
Tags:activation free energy barriers, Cambridge, energy, energy relative, nickel-carbene product
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Thursday, September 24th, 2015
How does an anaesthetic work? Surprisingly, it is only recently[1] that the possible binding sites of the anaesthetic propofol (2,6-di-isopropylphenol) have been identified using a technique known as photoaffinity labelling.[2] A propofol analogue was constructed[1] by replacing one of the isopropyl groups with a trifluoromethyl diazirine group (R=CF3, X=Y=N below). Upon photolysis, this species looses nitrogen and forms a carbene as a reactive species, which with further chemistry binds covalently[2] to adjacent amino acids in the binding pocket.These modified segments could then be analysed by mass spectrometry.[1] An isomer of diazirine is diazomethane, which is some 11 kcal/mol lower in free energy, but fortunately the diazirene is preventing from thermally isomerising to this species by a large kinetic barrier. That was the intro; now for a connection.‡ I recently attended a presentation on another medical topic, the therapeutic uses of carbon monoxide.[3] In higher concentrations it is notoriously lethal, but with appropriate delivery it can be therapeutic. So, intertwingling, I asked myself what the properties of the carbon monoxide isoelectronic analogue of a diazirine might be (X=C, Y=O below).
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References
- G.M.S. Yip, Z. Chen, C.J. Edge, E.H. Smith, R. Dickinson, E. Hohenester, R.R. Townsend, K. Fuchs, W. Sieghart, A.S. Evers, and N.P. Franks, "A propofol binding site on mammalian GABAA receptors identified by photolabeling", Nature Chemical Biology, vol. 9, pp. 715-720, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.1340
- L. Dubinsky, B.P. Krom, and M.M. Meijler, "Diazirine based photoaffinity labeling", Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry, vol. 20, pp. 554-570, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bmc.2011.06.066
- R. Motterlini, and L.E. Otterbein, "The therapeutic potential of carbon monoxide", Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, vol. 9, pp. 728-743, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd3228
Tags:anaesthetic, Diazirine, GABAA receptors, photo affinity labelling, propofol
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Saturday, July 25th, 2015
I recently followed this bloggers trail; link1 → link2 to arrive at this delightful short commentary on atom-atom bonds in crystals[1] by Jack Dunitz. Here he discusses that age-old question (to chemists), what is a bond? Even almost 100 years after Gilbert Lewis’ famous analysis,[2] we continue to ponder this question. Indeed, quite a debate on this topic broke out in a recent post here. My eye was caught by one example in Jack's article: "The close stacking of planar anions, as occurs in salts of croconic acid …far from producing a lowering of the crystal energy, this stacking interaction in itself leads to an increase by several thousand kJ mol−1 arising from Coulombic repulsion between the doubly negatively charged anions" I thought I might explore this point a bit further in this post.
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References
- J.D. Dunitz, "Intermolecular atom–atom bonds in crystals?", IUCrJ, vol. 2, pp. 157-158, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1107/s2052252515002006
- G.N. Lewis, "THE ATOM AND THE MOLECULE.", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 38, pp. 762-785, 1916. https://doi.org/10.1021/ja02261a002
Tags:Carbon, Cations, Chemical bond, control search, Croconic acid, crystal energy, crystal structure search, Gilbert Lewis, intermolecular search, Jack Dunitz, overall energy balance, Proton
Posted in Chemical IT, crystal_structure_mining, Interesting chemistry | 1 Comment »