No Added Chemicals

25.7 MW Lauingen Energy Park, Germany As part of solutions for the climate change, the demand for 'clean' energy has increased in the recent years. One of the piece of technologies that can fulfil this demand is solar cell which it can harness the solar energy. At this stage, the conventional solar cell, which is made of a thick layer of doped-silicon, is very expensive and the manufacturing process is energy consuming process. Another type of solar cell, dye sensitised solar cell (DSSC) or Grätzell cell, can be a solution for the expensive silicon solar cell. Instead of expensive silicon as semiconductor, cheaper TiO 2 is used and ruthenium-based complex compound as solar light harvester. However, this cell has a problem with solvent leakage, which can be  not environmentally friendly. The efficiency of this cell is also a problem; DSSC's efficiency is up to 11% while Si-based solar cell can be up to 25%. To address these problems, another type of solar cell has been ...

In the recent decade, chemists have taken nature as its inspiration in many ways; one of them is in medicinal chemistry. Many natural products have been screened for their bioactivities to develop new generation of therapeutic agents for 'incurable' diseases such as cancer. However, there is one major drawback from taking natural product as drug. This problem is its complex structure which makes it difficult to synthesise especially in large scale. Anticancer drugs: natural products (paclitaxel) and coordination complex (cisplatin) Luckily, a simple coordination complex, such as cisplatin, gives similar efficacy as natural product-based drug and simple coordination complex is used to treat 80% of all solid cancers. It is noteworthy that the market for this drug is around $1 billion.

In these days, the chemistry of natural products is still a massive attraction for chemists, especially organic synthetic chemists. New substances, more or less complicated, more or less useful, are constantly discovered and investigated with all the techniques and tools that the early organic chemists could only imagine. In the course of these studies, the researchers are challenged by the preparation of the compounds which somehow drives this field forward. This time, we'll see the historical perspective of this 'ancient' research field and also future prospective that chemistry of natural products can offer.