Tag Archives: synthesize

A ‘home run’ approach: Yale lab finds new ways to synthesize HIV inhibitor

Yale University chemists have created a new process for synthesizing an organic, nitrogen-based compound that inhibits HIV.

The process represents a fundamentally different approach to synthesizing alkaloids, which are naturally occurring compounds that contain nitrogen. The new approach uses a set of starting materials that do not require the usual tempering of nitrogen’s reactive tendencies. (more…)

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Bio for nano

Engineers work to create new biomaterials with energy technology applications

When automotive engineers want to create a new car, they don’t build thousands of prototypes. Instead, they create computer models and run simulations for performance, efficiency and desirability before a model is selected for fabrication.

University of Delaware materials science professors Darrin Pochan and Kristi Kiick are taking a similar approach to building new nanomaterials from biomolecules — namely peptides and proteins — that could increase the efficiency of photovoltaics, also known as solar cells, and other electronic devices. (more…)

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Energy Savings – Easy as Dirt, Heat, Pressure

By using common materials found pretty much anywhere there is dirt, a team of Michigan State University researchers have developed a new thermoelectric material.

This is important, they said, because the vast majority of heat that is generated from, for example, a car engine, is lost through the tail pipe. It’s the thermoelectric material’s job to take that heat and turn it into something useful, like electricity. (more…)

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Diamond in The Rough: Half-Century Puzzle Solved

A Yale-led team of mineral physicists has for the first time confirmed through high-pressure experiments the structure of cold-compressed graphite, a form of carbon that is comparable in hardness to its cousin, diamond, but only requires pressure to synthesize. The researchers believe their findings could open the way for a super hard material that can withstand great force and can be used — as diamond-based materials are now — for many electronic and industrial applications. The study appears in Scientific Reports, a Nature journal.

Under normal conditions, pure carbon exhibits vastly different physical properties depending on its structure. For example, graphite is soft, but diamond is one of the hardest materials known. Graphite conducts electricity, but diamond is an insulator. (more…)

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E. Coli Bacteria Engineered to Eat Switchgrass and Make Transportation Fuels

*Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) Researchers Reach Milestone on the Road to Biofuels*

A milestone has been reached on the road to developing advanced biofuels that can replace gasoline, diesel and jet fuels with a domestically-produced clean, green, renewable alternative.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered the first strains of  Escherichia coli bacteria that can digest switchgrass biomass and synthesize its sugars into all three of those transportation fuels. What’s more, the microbes are able to do this without any help from enzyme additives. (more…)

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