Posts Tagged ‘Julia Contreras-Garcia’

Bio-renewable green polymers: Stereoinduction in poly(lactic acid)

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

Lactide is a small molecule made from lactic acid, which is itself available in large quantities by harvesting plants rather than drilling for oil. Lactide can be turned into polymers with remarkable properties, which in turn degrade down easily back to lactic acid. A perfect bio-renewable material!

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Non-covalent interactions (NCI): revisiting Pirkle

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

NCI (non-covalent interactions) is the name of a fascinating new technique for identifying exactly these. Published recently by Johnson, Keinan, Mori-Snchez, Contreras-Garca, Cohen and Yang, it came to my attention at a conference to celebrate the 20th birthday of ELF when Julia Contreras-Garcia talked about the procedure. It is one of those methods which may seem as if it merely teases out the obvious about a molecule, but it is surprising how difficult seeing the obvious can be sometimes. I have blogged about this previously, in discussing the so-called Pirkle reagent. On that occasion, I used the QTAIM technique to identify so-called critical points in the electron density. NCI goes one stage further in identifying surfaces of interaction rather than just single points, the idea being that this focuses attention on regions in molecules which are primarily responsible for binding, stereoselection and other aspects of molecular selectivity.

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