Indole is one of the most abundant heterocycles in pharmaceuticals and bioactive natural products, such as indometacin, a non-steroid anti-inflammatory drug, and vincristine, a natural product used to...
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Liquid crystals, soft materials comprised of assemblies of organic molecules that exhibit long-range order at the five to 100 nanometer length scale, find widespread application in consumer goods rang...
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C3 and C4 olefins such as propene are key starting materials in the plastics and chemical industry. The main method for producing these critical building blocks is a petrochemical process called steam...
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Indole is one of the most abundant heterocycles in pharmaceuticals and bioactive natural products, such as indometacin, a non-steroid anti-inflammatory drug, and vincristine, a natural product used to...
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The reduction of small molecules such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide is extremely difficult because one-electron reduction processes often involve high-energy intermediates. Nitrogen reduction usually...
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Converting hydrocarbon feedstocks like shale natural gas into higher value fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals requires the oxidation of various functional groups. However, oxidizing alcohols to carbox...
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Catalysts for organic chemical transformations, in particular those used for alcohol oxidations, are considered to be valuable commodities for the bulk, fine chemical as well as pharmaceutical industr...
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Lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) assemblies are useful for highly selective chemical separations, such as water desalination and selective ion-transporting membranes. Bicontinuous cubic LLC assemblies a...
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Enantiomers are pairs of compounds that have the same chemical formula but different spatial structures (like your left and right hand, they are non-superimposable mirror images of each other). This i...
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Lignin is a major component of non-edible biomass (15-30 percent by weight; 40 percent by energy). It is a cheap byproduct of pulp and biofuel production and is one of the few naturally occurring sour...
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Aqueous lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) assemblies are useful for highly selective chemical separations, such as water desalination and selective ion-transporting membranes. LLCs are formed in water wh...
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Medical isotopes are valuable healthcare tools for patient imaging and disease treatment. Yet most radioisotopes used in medicine are produced in nuclear reactors, which are complex, generate high vol...
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Many pharmaceuticals and other biologically active molecules contain chemical sequences called triads that are challenging to prepare in the laboratory. Specifically, triads are three or more contiguo...
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In chemical manufacturing, a production system may receive and process raw materials in multiple steps, with each step or task associated with a certain procedure or tool. Ideally, each step is schedu...
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Sorbic acid has been used extensively as a preservative in a vast array of food. The benefits of sorbates as food preservatives are two-fold: sorbates inhibit a wide spectrum of bacteria, yeasts and m...
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The reduction of small molecules such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide is extremely difficult because one-electron reduction processes often involve high-energy intermediates. Nitrogen reduction usually...
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Phosphines have many commercial and industrial uses as attachments to rare earth metal catalysts, including specialized uses in asymmetric hydrogenation and other catalytic transformations. Asymmetric...
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Endoperoxides are prominent structural features of several natural products with potent activity against malaria and various cancer cell lines. However, they are difficult to synthesize. The most stra...
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Unnatural polymers that contain β- and γ-amino acids are known as "foldamers." These foldamers form long-lasting, predictable structures that are very stable and resistant to proteolytic d...
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The lack of methods to easily synthesize sufficient quantities of selectively modified peptides and proteins has hindered research on the biological functions and molecular interactions of side-chain ...
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Asymmetric synthesis is important in the pharmaceutical industry because frequently only one optically active isomer, or enantiomer, is therapeutically active. Therefore, it is often desirable to sele...
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Diazo compounds, which have the general formula R2C=N2, are versatile intermediates in organic synthesis.  They participate in a variety of thermal, photochemical and metal-catalyzed reactions. Most ...
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UW–Madison researchers previously developed a method of using traceless Staudinger ligation to chemically synthesize proteins (see WARF reference number P00315US).  This method is based on the Stau...
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Beta amino acids are the basic building blocks of beta peptides, which have physiological applications, such as blocking human cytomegalovirus infection. Although some types of beta amino acids are re...
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Position emission tomography (PET) plays a vital role in the diagnosis of health and disease. The long-lived isotope iodine-124 (I-124; half-life 4.2 days) has many features that make it an attractive...
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