No Added Chemicals

The generosity of mother nature is limitless and it will not stop giving for humankind to thrive. Besides that, nature has been a close friend with chemists especially organic chemists. Complex structures of natural products have been a great interest as it provides to develop synthetic methods to synthesise natural products. One of the 'hunting grounds' of synthetic organic chemists is the sea, and one of the products is called eleutherobin, 1 . Eleutherobin can be isolated form a species of marine soft corals Eleutherobia  collected in the Indian Ocean near Bennett's Shoal in Western Australia. Despite its rarity, eleutherobin is a potent compound against selected breast, renal, ovarian, and lung cancer cells. This highly potential compound drove Nicolaou's group to synthesise this compound.

Machinery has propelled human civilisation into another level by helping us to perform tasks beyond our capability. In decades, human has made different type of machines with various of sizes; from enormous machine into molecular-size machinery. The ideas of molecular-size machinery are inspired from the nature in the cellular level such as ATP synthase motor and kinesin transporter. ATP synthase motor (right, J. Weber, Nat. Chem. Biol. , 2010, 6 , 794-795) and Feringa's nanocar (left, ©Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) One of the prominent examples of the molecular machines is Feringa's nanocar  where the molecule is propelled by four rotating molecular motors.

The synthesis of supramolecules has become an intense interest in the recent years, especially conjugated π-system. In the previous post , a cyclic octamer of porphyrin was synthesised and it gives optical interesting properties. Increasing its dimensionality, such as into barrel-like structure, could enhance electronic delocalisation and perhaps leading to exotic properties such as Aharonov-Bohm oscillation. This property has been observed in single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) but it hasn't yet been detected in molecular materials, so this gives motivation for synthetic chemist to synthesise the molecular SWNT to observe this exotic property. Anderson's group from Oxford University successfully synthesised porphyrin tube 1  which consists of 12 porphyrins, each of which is directly conjugated to its three neighbours.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences  has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 to \ Jean-Pierre Sauvage (University of Strasbourg, France) Sir J. Fraser Stoddart (Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA) Bernard L. Feringa (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines"

Chemical physicist and spectroscopist C. K. Jørgensen once said that one of the major goals of inorganic chemistry is to prepare compounds of elements in unusual oxidation states. In 2009, the range of oxidation states produced from chemical reaction was -4 to +8, and in 2010 Himmel's group showed that Ir compound with +9 oxidation state, [IrO 4 ] + , exists by electronic structure calculations. In 2014, Wang's group confirmed the existence of the Ir(IX) by matrix-isolation experiments. From these ideas, can it be stretched further? Let say oxidation state +10?

The secondary structures of proteins, such as α-helices, β-sheets, or β- or γ-turns, mainly determine the overall 3-dimensional structures of protein and these structures are mainly stabilised by interactions such as hydrogen bonding (H-bonding) and dispersion interactions. Besides that, the interaction with its biological environment also contributes to the overall structure which means the intrinsic properties of the protein are hidden. Therefore, to have a better understanding about protein structure, proteins or polypeptides must be in isolated condition where no solvent molecules are present. One of the methods that can be used to study peptides in this isolated is gas-phase spectroscopy. 3D structure of myoglobin with α-helices and random coils are shown

Recently, large conjugated π-systems have been a great interest due to their unique properties such as electrical conductivity, or they are commonly known as molecular wires. Taking a step further, it can be closed into a large cyclic system, i.e. macrocyle, or known as a closed loop. One of the examples of this system is porphyrin oligomers where linear conjugated porphyrin oligomers show strong long-range electronic coupling and rich non-linear optical behaviour. These unique properties provide a motivation for synthesising its macrocycle and probing its properties.