Brianna Barbu

1 month ago | pubs.acs.org | Brianna Barbu

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1 month ago | cen.acs.org | Prachi Patel |Brianna Barbu

Jonathan Wilker swivels in his chair and sweeps his hand around the room. "There's the computer, the book bindings, the furniture, shoes, the carpet, all the packaging and boxes, plywood, the walls," he says. Wilker, a chemist and materials engineer, is sitting in his office in the Herbert C. Brown chemistry building at Purdue University. He is talking about all the things in the room that contain adhesives.

2 months ago | cen.acs.org | Brianna Barbu

Reactions that completely break carbon-carbon double bonds have particular transformative power in synthesis. Ozonolysis, which splits one alkene into two carbonyl compounds using trioxygen, is widely used in both industrial and academic settings. And while nitrogen is a valuable component of many natural products, drugs, and agrochemicals, chemists have struggled to come up with an accessible nitrogen-based equivalent to ozonolysis.

2 months ago | cen.acs.org | Brianna Barbu

This sphere may look like a cluster of Froot Loops, but it's actually the structure of a drug delivery capsule made from 24 ring-shaped translocon-associated protein (TRAP) complexes held together with cobalt, gold, or zinc ions. Created by researchers at Durham University and the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology, these 22-nm diameter cages are large enough to comfortably tote a couple of proteins-or a couple hundred small drug molecules.

2 months ago | cen.acs.org | Brianna Barbu

Sometimes, failure can be beautiful, thought Vanessa Tabernero Magro, an inorganic chemist at the University of Alcalá, as she looked in this flask containing a reaction gone awry. She captured this image after trying but failing to make a biobased anethole polymer using a silicon-based catalyst. While the alkyl silicon catalyst didn't give her the product she wanted, the gunk that came out of the unsuccessful reaction had a strange beauty to it.