Archive for the ‘Chemical IT’ Category

What is the approach trajectory of enhanced (super?) nucleophiles towards a carbonyl group?

Wednesday, May 11th, 2016

I have previously commented on the Bürgi–Dunitz angle, this being the preferred approach trajectory of a nucleophile towards the electrophilic carbon of a carbonyl group. Some special types of nucleophile such as hydrazines (R2N-NR2) are supposed to have enhanced reactivity[1] due to what might be described as buttressing of adjacent lone pairs. Here I focus in on how this might manifest by performing searches of the Cambridge structural database for intermolecular (non-bonded) interactions between X-Y nucleophiles (X,Y= N,O,S) and carbonyl compounds OC(NM)2.

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References

  1. G. Klopman, K. Tsuda, J. Louis, and R. Davis, "Supernucleophiles—I", Tetrahedron, vol. 26, pp. 4549-4554, 1970. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0040-4020(01)93101-1

Collaborative FAIR data sharing.

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

I want to describe a recent attempt by a group of collaborators to share the research data associated with their just published article.[1]

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References

  1. C. Romain, Y. Zhu, P. Dingwall, S. Paul, H.S. Rzepa, A. Buchard, and C.K. Williams, "Chemoselective Polymerizations from Mixtures of Epoxide, Lactone, Anhydride, and Carbon Dioxide", Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 138, pp. 4120-4131, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.5b13070

Publishing embargoes.

Wednesday, April 13th, 2016

Publishing embargoes seem a relatively new phenomenon, probably starting in areas of science when the data produced for a scientific article was considered more valuable than the narrative of that article. However, the concept of the embargo seems to be spreading to cover other aspects of publishing, and I came across one recently which appears to take such embargoes into new and uncharted territory.

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Celebrating Paul Schleyer: searching for hidden treasures in the structures of metallocene complexes.

Saturday, April 2nd, 2016

A celebration of the life and work of the great chemist Paul von R. Schleyer was held this week in Erlangen, Germany. There were many fantastic talks given by some great chemists describing fascinating chemistry. Here I highlight the presentation given by Andy Streitwieser on the topic of organolithium chemistry, also a great interest of Schleyer's over the years. I single this talk out since I hope it illustrates why people still get together in person to talk about science.

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Does combining molecules with augmented reality have a future?

Monday, March 28th, 2016

Augmented reality, a superset if you like of virtual reality (VR), has really been hitting the headlines recently. Like 3D TV, its been a long time coming! Since ~1994 or earlier, there have been explorations of how molecular models can be transferred from actual reality to virtual reality using conventional computers (as opposed to highly specialised ones). It was around then that a combination of software (Rasmol) and hardware (Silicon Graphics, and then soon after standard personal computers with standard graphics cards) became capable of such manipulations. VRML (virtual reality modelling language) also proved something of a false start So have things changed?

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Research data: Managing spectroscopy-NMR.

Wednesday, March 16th, 2016

At the ACS conference, I have attended many talks these last four days, but one made some “connections” which intrigued me. I tell its story (or a part of it) here.

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Global initiatives in research data management and discovery: searching metadata.

Monday, March 7th, 2016

The upcoming ACS national meeting in San Diego has a CINF (chemical information division) session entitled "Global initiatives in research data management and discovery". I have highlighted here just one slide from my contribution to this session, which addresses the discovery aspect of the session.

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LEARN Workshop: Embedding Research Data as part of the research cycle

Monday, February 1st, 2016

I attended the first (of a proposed five) workshops organised by LEARN (an EU-funded project that aims to ...Raise awareness in research data management (RDM) issues & research policy) on Friday. Here I give some quick bullet points relating to things that caught my attention and or interest. The program (and Twitter feed) can be found at https://learnrdm.wordpress.com where other's comments can also be seen. 

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Some examples of open access publications citing managed research data (RDM).

Tuesday, January 5th, 2016

In May 2015, the EPSRC funding council in the UK required researchers to publish the outcomes of the funded work to include an OA (open access) version of the narrative and to cite the managed research data used to support the research with a DOI (digital object identifier). I was discussing these aspects with a senior manager (research outcomes) at the EPSRC and he asked me to provide some examples from my area of chemistry; here are some.

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