Posts Tagged ‘Chemistry’
-
March 19th, 2010
ACS Spring meeting 2010
I’m currently en route to San Francisco to exhibit at this year’s American Chemical Society spring meeting. The theme of the meeting is ‘chemistry for a sustainable world’, so I’m looking forward to checking out some of the latest advances in green chemistry. We’ll be on booth 1031, so if you’re attending feel free to come by and say hello.
-
December 1st, 2009
Introduction
Hello ‘gold-minded blog readers’,
This being my first post I would like to introduce myself and my interests with respect to gold.
My name is Jonathan Edgar. I am a PhD student at the University of Technology, Sydney.
My work revolves around the synthesis and characterisation of gold nanoparticles with different geometries (e.g. nanorods, nanoshells, stars etc)
If you are interested or want to investigate other research being undertaken within our institute, check out http://www.nano.uts.edu.au/
Shameless self-promotion aside, I did stumble across a way for gold researchers to capitalise on the potential explosion of uses for graphene (oxides etc);
Jasuja, K.; Berry, V. ACS Nano 2009, 3, 2358-2366.
The paper above details the tailoring of the electrical properties of sheets of graphene oxide by seeding the growth of gold “nanosnowflakes” upon functional groups (COOH and OH) on the sheets.
-
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… -
April 9th, 2009
ScienceWatch Says Gold is Hot
Although I am convinced the growth in research activity focused on gold (chemistry, nanotechnology and catalysis) is very significant , it is always nice to have external support of this trend.
This week ScienceWatch published its latest ‘Whats Hot in Chemistry’ and guess what? Gold is in the Top Ten; a paper describing a nano-sized agglomerate of 102 gold atoms which received 15 citations between Sept-Oct 2008.
Gold also features in a paper which only just failed to make the Top Ten list and is at position #12. This reports oxidative rearrangements catalyzed by gold and is the work of a group led by Dean Toste of the University of California at Berkeley. It was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society(C.A. Witham, et al., 129[18]: 5838, 2007).
Please let me know of any other highly-cited gold-related papers we should highlight here…….
-
March 12th, 2009
New Gold Books from Wiley
A page of World Gold Council’s website Utilise Gold is dedicated to books and publications focused on the science and technology of gold. Publisher Wiley now has two recent additions to this range of books:
Gold Chemistry: Applications and Future Directions in the Life Sciences, ISBN: 978-3-527-32086-8 and Modern Supramolecular Gold Chemistry: Gold-Metal Interactions and Applications, ISBN: 978-3-527-32029-5…..more evidence of the recent expansion in research and potential applications for gold.
If you have a copy of either book, please feel free to add your comments below. Reviews are also due to appear in the journal Gold Bulletin -
March 11th, 2009
Cancer, Cisplatin and Gold Nanoparticles
The awful side effects experienced by patients when undergoing chemotherapy treatments for cancer are well known. These side effects arise because the powerful anti-cancer drugs don’t just target the cancer cells, unfortunately they also hit healthy cells. Overcoming this problem is a major focus of many research groups working in the cancer field.
Brown University chemists have created a twin nanoparticle that specifically targets the Her-2-positive tumor cell, a type of malignant cell that affects up to 30 % of breast cancer patients and unloads the cancer-fighting drug cisplatin directly into the infected cell. (See image above, Credit: Chenjie Xu, Shouheng Sun/Brown University)
The researchers created the twin nanoparticle by binding one gold nanoparticle with an iron-oxide nanoparticle. On one end, they attached a synthetic protein antibody to the iron-oxide nanoparticle and on the other they attached cisplatin to the gold nanoparticle.
In laboratory tests, the gold-iron oxide nanoparticle combination successfully targeted the cancer cells and released the anti-cancer drugs into the malignant cells, killing the cells in up to 80 percent of cases.
Trevor Keel
Jonathan Edgar
Richard Holliday
Recent comments: