Brianna Barbu

1 month 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.

1 month 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.

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

Perfect cacio e pepe Cacio e pepe is the simplest of the four fundamental Roman pasta dishes -its only ingredients are pasta, starch-enriched pasta water, pecorino cheese, and black pepper-and yet, it is notoriously difficult to get right. Mix the wrong proportion of cheese and pasta water at the wrong temperature, and the casein and whey proteins will aggregate, resulting in a clumpy mess instead of a silky sauce.

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

Acrylic polymers such as poly(methyl methacrylate)-the plastic used in Plexiglas-are durable materials with a huge variety of commercial applications. But the all-carbon backbones that give these plastics their strength also make them difficult to break down for chemically recycling. "Every polymer, in principle, can be depolymerized if you heat it to the right temperature," says polymer chemist Athina Anastasaki of ETH Zurich.

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

Small, polar rings and electron-withdrawing atoms are both well-loved motifs in medicinal chemistry. So oxetanes and fluorine atoms could be a match made in drug discovery heaven. Researchers also predict that oxetanes decorated with fluorines would have valuable pharmacological properties. But examples of such compounds in the literature are rare, and "there's no general method to synthesize these compounds," says organic chemist Ming Joo Koh at the National University of Singapore.