Archive for the ‘Chemistry’ Category
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March 3rd, 2010
Anticancer gold complexes
The current issue of Chemistry – A European Journal leads with a nice paper entitled ”Stable Anticancer Gold(III)-Porphyrin Complexes: Effects of Porphyrin Structure”. Gold complexes have long been investigated as potential treatments of a variety of ailments, and this paper represents some of the very latest research in the field. A full abstract can be found here. -
February 12th, 2010
Gold for good – a new article from the WGC
Yesterday we released a new publication written by the World Gold Council and Cientifica called ‘Gold for good – gold and nanotechnology in the age of innovation’. The article, which is freely available on both the WGC and Cientifica websites, discusses the past, present and future of gold-based nanotechnology, focusing on key areas in medicine, the environment and technology.I am attending the 2010 Nanotech Japan event in Tokyo next week where I will be launching the article, and will follow this with a trip to the ACS spring meeting in California towards the end of March. Feel free to drop me a line if you are attending either event, I’d be happy to discuss any aspect of the WGCs activities, including our funding and investment programmes.
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January 6th, 2010
Nature Nanotechnology feature article
Nature Nanotechnology, the leading journal which covers all aspects of nanotech-based research, has just published an excellent article on the ever-growing field of gold-based catalysis. The piece, entitled ‘A Golden Opportunity’, is particularly interesting as it focuses on the drive to commercialise gold-based catalysts, and features commentary and opinion from a number of eminent academic and industrial scientists including Chris Hardacre of Queens University Belfast, Graham Hutchings of Cardiff University, Jason McPherson of Mintek and David Barton of Dow Chemical Company amongst others.Here at the World Gold Council we are particularly excited to see the publication of this article in such an eminent journal. The tone of the piece certainly fits in with our aim of aiding the acceleration of gold-based technologies to market by providing marketing expertise and offering various funding strategies. For more information on our funding programmes, see here.
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December 21st, 2009
New Book – Gold Science and Applications
I’m excited to announce that a new book ‘Gold – Science and Applications’ has now been published.
There have been many excellent books written on certain aspects of the science and technology of gold, most notably the book of the Hanau gold conference, held in 1996 (“Gold. Progress in Chemistry, Biochemistry and Technology”, edited by Hubert Schmidbaur and published in 1999) and there are several new books covering specific sectors of gold science e.g. on catalysis, chemistry and nanotechnology (see here). However, for those seeking a broader reference source on gold and covering all technical sectors, the most appropriate book on gold, Gold Usage by Bill Rapson and Theo Groenewald, was published over 30 years ago in 1978. The world of gold has changed considerably since then. A few years ago Chris Corti and I believed it was time for an updated book that reflects the more recent developments.
With the co-operation of some of the leading experts in their field, we have attempted to produce a book that is a worthy successor to ‘Rapson’ and to provide an authoritive source of information. We have attempted to cover all the main scientific areas as well as the main areas of application. In some cases this has required some very detailed scientific chapters; other fields require less specific detail and have focused more on the practical application. In addition, to help readers place this science and technology in the context of a much wider gold market, a chapter on the supply, demand and pricing of gold is included. Taken together, our aim for the book is to appeal to both those working in academia and industry.
If you are interested, your can read more and purchase it here .
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November 6th, 2009
Linking catalyst properties to particle size
This weeks edition of Science carries a nice paper entitled Electronic Structure Controls Reactivity of Size-Selected Pd Clusters Adsorbed on TiO2 Surfaces. What the authors, based at the University of Utah, have demonstrated is the first conclusive link between the size of catalyst particles on a solid surface, their electronic properties and their ability to speed up chemical reactions.
This is an important paper indeed. Take gold as an example – it’s pretty expensive stuff, as are all of the noble metals employed as catalysts. If, say, 50% of a precious metal catalyst is in fact inactive/poorly active because the particles are not of an optimal size then that adds up to a lot of wasted gold. A better understanding of the link between particle size and activity will undoubtedly make for more efficient (both chemically and economically!) catalysts
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November 3rd, 2009
Platinum, gold and fighting cancer
Many of you will probably have heard of Cisplatin, which is an effective platinum-based chemotherapy drug used in the treatment of a range of cancers. As with many cancer drugs, it does have a number of side-effects which can limit its use so ways of improving its delivery, and potentially lessening any side-effects, have long been sought.
This paper, recently published in JACS, describes attempts to do just that. The team, which was led by Chad Mirkin at Northwestern and Stephen Lippard at MIT, have attached a cisplatin prodrug to gold nanoparticles. The action of introducing these nanoparticles into cancer cells facilitated the reductive release of cisplatin from the prodrug, and the subsequent formation of a highly cytotoxic platinum complex. In some cases this complex was shown to be more cytotoxic than cisplatin alone, with the added bonus of having reduced platinum-associated toxicity.
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October 21st, 2009
The world’s smallest test tube…?
I love reading about new nanotechnology breakthroughs, and the journal science is often a good place to look for such articles. Indeed there’s a great paper in the most recent issue penned by a team at the University of Texas at Austin. What the group, led by Brian Korgel, have done is fashion a nanoscale test tube out of a ultra-thin carbon shell. This nano test tube contains a gold nanocrystal on the end of a germanium nanowire.
Whilst this is a pretty unusual experimental set up, no question, it has allowed the team to closely study physical transformations in materials. Because the gold and germanium are both confined by the carbon shell, changes in volume and interfacial area are prevented on heating and cooling. Using electron microscopy, the fundamental heating, cooling and crystallisation processes of the gold and germanium could be observed – they even made a couple of movies of the melt/diffusion events!
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October 5th, 2009
Gold catalysis papers in Angewandte Chemie
Angewandte Chemie, one of the most highly regarded chemistry-based journals, has recently published (or is about to publish via its ‘early view’ process) a number of excellent papers in the field of gold catalysis, further proof of the considerable excitement and interest in the field at the moment.The first comes from the labs of Masatake Haruta, and is titled ‘Propene Epoxidation with dioxygen catalysed by gold clusters’. As many of you will be aware, this is an important reaction as the product (methyloxirane) is a key building block for the manufacture of polyurethane, along with various other organic intermediates and solvents. Making methyloxirane cleanly and in good yield is not simple, and gold-based catalysis has long shown great potential in this important reaction, something furthered by Professor Haruta’s paper.
The second paper I spotted comes from the labs of Graham Hutchings in Cardiff. Here the team have shown enhanced catalytic activity of specific Au-Pd catalysts supported on TiO2 for the direct synthesis of H2O2 from H2 and O2.
Finally, Stephen Hashmi has penned a nice communication dealing with the liason of palladium and gold catalysts as a basis for a new class of cross-coupling reactions.
To me, each of these high quality papers is a clear indication of the strength of gold-based catalysis research at the moment.
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September 18th, 2009
Review of Gold Chemistry Book
Earlier this year there was a post about the book Gold Chemistry: Applications and Future Directions in the Life Sciences, Fabian Mohr (Editor). This book has just been reviewed by the Journal of Nanophotonics here… -
September 2nd, 2009
Rice University does it again….
Rice University is making a habit of this. Developing innovative gold-based technologies that is. First we had Profs Naomi Halas and Jennifer West creating gold nanoshells for use in a range of biomedical applications, that has since been developed into the AuroShell product. Then Prof Michael Wong demonstrated the ability of Au-Pd nanoparticles to remove contaminants from groundwater (see video here). Now, Eugene Zubarev, associate professor in chemistry at Rice has created gold-platinum catalysts that are soluble enough for industrial use, but can also be easily removed from the manufactured product. See the press release from Rice University here.
The research is available online in the Sept. 1 issue of the German scientific journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
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