News
Find out about the latest news, announcements and stories about chemistry at ANU.
- News
Fresh and clean water is becoming a scarce resource due to the multiple impacts of worldwide urbanization, industrialization, or growing global population. Ensuring universal access to fresh water is therefore an emergent issue of growing urgency.
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Climate change and energy security may be big global problems, but the solutions can often occur at a molecular level. How we deal with a range of gases, whether it is capturing and storing carbon dioxide, or turning hydrogen into a clean energy source to replace fossil fuels, will be essential to solving these problems.
A New Zealand local, who completed his doctorate at Oxford University and post doc in Vancouver before landing at the ANU in 2015, Dr Nick White is working at this molecular level to make his contribution to these solutions.
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Chemists have found a way to use sunlight to purify wastewater rapidly and cheaply, and to make self-cleaning materials for buildings.
The technology uses modified titanium dioxide as a photocatalyst that works with sunlight, unlike other leading water purification products on the market that need ultraviolet light.
Research group leader Professor Yun Liu from ANU said the team's invention was 15 times more efficient than leading commercialised products.
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For Ben Clifton, who recently finished his PhD at the Research School of Chemistry, solute-binding proteins has always been an area of interest. The latest student to finish a PhD on the Rod Rickards scholarship, Ben has a long history of researching these proteins at RSC.
“My honours and PhD research focussed on a family of proteins called solute-binding proteins (SBPs),” Ben explains. “We initially became interested in SBPs because they can be used to engineer fluorescent sensors for detecting specific molecules.”
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Developing a new medical drug often requires a detailed understanding of how and where the drug compound binds to the target protein. However, for large protein-ligand complexes, it is often difficult to find the ‘binding mode’ of the ligand on the protein.
As part of a new Australian Research Council (ARC) Grant, Professor Gottfried Otting and his team will use Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to enhance our understanding of such complexes, with a view on the creation of high-value drugs for diseases such as Dengue fever and the Zika virus.
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Materials with nonlinear optical (NLO) properties are becoming increasingly important in an age of photonics. With the capacity to modify the phase, frequency, amplitude, polarisation, intensity, and/or path of incident light, NLO materials have huge potential in technologies that involve the manipulation of light — whether it be optical signal processing, data storage, communication or image processing.
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Research to help fight multi-resistant bacteria | University News : The University of Western Australia
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Saltman Lecture 2017: Nick Cox
"High-Field Pulse EPR - A Biophysical Toolbox for the Study of the Oxygen Evolving Complex"
The 2017 Saltman Lecturer at the Gordon Research Conference on Metals in Biology (MIB) was Dr Nicholas Cox, who gave an exciting talk on new technology for studying one of nature’s key enzymes. The lecture is in honor of Paul Saltman who was one of the founders of the metals in biology Gordon conference. Each year the conference chair selects a promising young scientist for this honor, and the Saltman lecture is a highlight of the conference.