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Category: chemistry – Page 30

Migrating charges unlock hard-to-reach C-H bond edits in organic molecules

A team at the University of Vienna, led by chemist Nuno Maulide, has developed a new method for controlling chemical reactions in a more targeted and efficient manner. At the heart of this is the concept of “cation sampling”: specially selected groups (ketones), in a sense, function as molecular signposts for randomly migrating positive charges, enabling reactions to take place at sites on a molecule that were previously difficult to access. The method allows carbon-hydrogen bonds (C–H bonds) to be specifically modified. The study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Organic molecules form the basis of almost all biological processes. They consist mainly of carbon and hydrogen—and hydrogen atoms in particular are very common in such molecules. “If you want to alter the properties of a molecule, you often have to specifically replace individual hydrogen atoms,” explains Philipp Spieß, a former Ph.D. student in the Maulide group and one of the study’s lead authors.

The precise modification of C–H bonds is therefore considered one of the key challenges of modern synthetic chemistry. It plays an important role in the development of new drugs, functional materials and more efficient chemical processes.

Quantum-centric supercomputing simulates 12,635-atom protein

The scale of chemistry simulations with quantum computing has increased dramatically in just the last few months. In the latest milestone for the field, researchers from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM used a quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework to calculate the electronic structure of a pair of large protein-ligand complexes, reaching a scale of 12,635 atoms in the largest simulation.

The molecules were T4-Lysozyme, a protein from a family of proteins involved in the immune system degradation of peptidoglycans in bacterial membranes, and Trypsin, produced in the pancreas and used in digestion. The team simulated these proteins binding to molecules they interact with in nature and immersed in a liquid water solution, at scales of 11,608 atoms and 12,635 atoms respectively. Bringing together an international team of researchers from across the United States and Japan made it possible to develop the necessary algorithm and workflow enhancements to reach this milestone.

The researchers achieved this scale just four months after modeling the 303-atom miniprotein Trp-cage using quantum computing for the first time. Today’s new result not only demonstrates a 40-fold increase in system size compared to the Trp-cage result, it represents a 210-times improvement in accuracy from previous state-of-the-art QCSC approaches in a specific step of the workflow.

Careful crystallization unlocks well-ordered perovskite layers for transistors

Perovskites are a class of materials with a unique crystal structure that suits applications such as fabricating solar cells, light-emitting diodes and transistors. However, molecules in thin layers often cannot arrange themselves properly because the process proceeds too quickly. Now, an international research team led by Tomasz Marszalek from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has developed a new approach to controlling low-cost solution processing, thereby improving the formation of well-ordered perovskite layers and enabling their broader application in optoelectronic devices. Their paper is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Electronics can be found in almost every device, from smartphones and televisions to washing machines. Field-effect transistors are the main building blocks of electronic circuits, and they ensure that these devices can be easily operated and fully controlled. Perovskites are a new class of semiconductor that could be suitable for transistor applications. They contain various chemical elements, such as organic cations, divalent metal cations, and halide anions. This combination of elements enables the properties of thin perovskite films to be tailored precisely for specific applications.

Currently, their use in transistors is often unsuccessful due to a lack of control over the formation of the thin film, known as nucleation and crystallization. Therefore, researchers are attempting to organize the materials into thin, two-dimensional layers and stabilize them with organic molecules between the inorganic layers in order to control their optoelectronic properties.

Bioengineers condense protein engineering and testing to a single day

Proteins are critical to life—and to industry. There are countless proteins that could be engineered to treat and even cure serious diseases and cellular dysfunctions. Industrial applications are similarly promising, with proteins increasingly used as enzymes in food manufacturing and in consumer detergents.

While AI can help suggest improvements, each novel protein must still be created in the real world and tested for performance. It is a labor-intensive process that involves constructing the DNA instructions for each protein in yeast or bacteria and growing individual clones for protein production and testing. This can take many days for a single protein of interest and even longer if the protein needs to be tested in mammalian cells, a process that requires retrieving DNA from microbes for transfer to the mammalian cells.

In a new paper, Michael Z. Lin, a professor of neurobiology and of bioengineering in the schools of Engineering and Medicine, and graduate students, Yan Wu in bioengineering and Pengli Wang in chemical engineering, say they have condensed the time-intensive protein building and testing process to just 24 hours.

NASA Curiosity rover finds mysterious life linked molecules on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover has identified a wide range of organic molecules on Mars, including compounds that scientists consider key ingredients for the origin of life on Earth.

The discovery comes from a chemical experiment carried out on another planet for the first time. Results show that the Martian surface is capable of preserving molecules that could act as potential signs of ancient life. However, the experiment cannot determine whether these organic compounds came from past life on Mars, natural geological processes, or meteorites that struck the planet.

To confirm any true evidence of past life, scientists would need to bring Martian rock samples back to Earth for detailed study.

New recyclable protein textiles could cut microplastic pollution and lower clothing waste

The textile industry produces a substantial portion of the world’s waste, with only about 12% of fiber materials ending up in recycling. Textiles also account for much of the microplastics in oceans. During every wash cycle, synthetic fibers shed microplastics that are flushed down the drain and eventually enter aquatic environments. Increasing textile recycling alone won’t solve this problem because most petrochemical-based fibers are difficult to recycle and continue to release persistent microplastics throughout their life cycle.

Engineers from Washington University in St. Louis may have a solution, thanks to dedicated synthetic biology work in the lab of Fuzhong Zhang, the Francis F. Ahmann Professor in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering and co-director of Synthetic Biology Manufacturing of Advanced Materials Research Center (SMARC).

The results of that work, now published in the journal Advanced Materials, created protein-based materials, which are produced in bioreactors (think giant brewing tanks) using genetically engineered microbes. These materials can be readily recycled after use and remade into the same fibers over multiple cycles. In addition, any microparticles, if released from these fibers during washing, would be biodegradable.

Astrophysicists use ‘space archaeology’ to trace the history of a spiral galaxy

Billions of years ago, a young spiral galaxy began to grow in a crowded part of the universe. It pulled in gas and small companion galaxies, slowly building up the bright central region and sweeping spiral arms we see today.

In a new study published in March 2026, my colleagues and I used this galaxy’s chemical fingerprints to reconstruct its life story in detail.

Astronomers want to know how spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way came to be, as these galaxies can give us hints about how the elements we rely on, such as oxygen, were created and spread through space over time.

Scientists Just Found New Evidence of Life on Enceladus

The question Enceladus is asking is whether the transition from chemistry to biology is easy or hard. Whether it is something that happens whenever conditions permit, or whether we are alone in a universe that almost got there but never quite did.

A small, bright moon, five hundred kilometres wide, has become the most precise instrument humanity has ever had for answering that question. And it is answering it in real time, one grain of ice at a time.

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Timestamps:
0:00 Enceladus.
1:28 The Moon Herschel Couldn’t See.
4:46 Cassini and the Plumes.
8:18 The Chemistry Stack.
13:26 The 2025 Reveal: Fresh Organics and a Stable Ocean.
22:40 The Honest Complication.
27:24 What the Ice Grains Are Carrying.

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Fexl Spanish: / @fexl_es.
Fexl Portuguese: / @fexlpt.
Fexl Ukraine: / @fexl_ua.

#fexl #space #enceladus

Sustainable chemistry: Iron substitutes noble metals in catalytic reactions

The production of many products used in everyday life and in industry, such as pharmaceuticals, plastics, and coatings, requires chemical catalysts, often expensive noble metals with limited availability. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are now presenting the first air-stable iron compound, which enables the direct use of iron(I) for catalysis and, unlike previous methods, does not require strong reducing agents. A first test yielded active iron catalysts.

The study, “A Simple, Air Stable Single-Ion Source of Iron(I),” is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Catalysts are required to speed up chemical reactions or even make them possible at all. The catalysts generally used in industry are noble metals, such as rhodium, iridium, or palladium. They are highly effective for many applications, but at the same time expensive and rare.

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