The gold nanocrystals created by Catherine Murphy carry huge potential The gold nanoparticles created by Catherine Murphy, the Larry R.

Researchers at the University have designed an enzyme that helps decrease harmful chemical compounds and contaminants in the environment. The research was published on Sept. 14 and focuses on how the newly designed enzyme can transform sulfite, a chemical compound that can be harmful for the environment, into sulfide, another chemical compound that can improve the efficacy of catalysts.

Professor M. Christina White is the 2019 winner of the ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, one of the American Chemical Society’s highest National Awards. Prof. White joins a very impressive list of previous awardees, including Illinois faculty Nelson Leonard and Scott Denmark, and Nobelists such as R.B. Woodward and K. Barry Sharpless, who represent the most prominent researchers in organic synthesis since 1957. Prof. White is also the first woman to join this rarefied club of award winners.

A new study, published in Nature Communications, is from research by Wilfred van der Donk and a group of chemists from the University of Illinois and Harvard University.

What does it take to have a positive impact on the human experience? It requires bold ideas and the freedom to pursue innovative solutions.

Chemistry professor Jefferson Chan, graduate students Chelsea Anorma and Thomas Bearrood, and postdoctoral researcher Jamila Hedhli, developed a molecular probe that can tag and track elusive cancer stem cells in both cell cultures and mice.

With approval from the Board of Trustees, Prof. Liviu Mirica will join the Illinois Chemistry faculty in January 2019 as the William H. and Janet G.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Makers of cars, planes, buses – anything that needs strong, lightweight and heat resistant parts – are poised to benefit from a new manufacturing process that requires only a quick touch from a small heat source to send a cascading hardening wave through a polymer.

Professor Prashant Jain and his colleagues report they can use light to drive two-electron chemical reactions, enhancing a method for converting CO2 into hydrocarbons.

Recent work from the White Group on a new manganese catalyzed benzylic C—H amination for late-stage C—H functionalization was published in Nature Chemistry last week and was also highlighted in C&E News on Monday, May 8th.

The National Science Foundation recently granted the University of Illinois $3 million for an interdisciplinary graduate student training program to help form new insight on the brain—and to expand participation in the field of brain science itself.

It took two years, two supercomputers and two Illinois researchers, Juan Perilla and the late Klaus Schulten, to simulate 1.2 microseconds in the life of an HIV capsid, a protein cage that protects the viral genome.

Lydia Kisley, a Beckman-Brown Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Fellow, and colleagues including Martin Grueble and Deborah Leckband, recently used Fast Relaxation Imaging (FReI) to investigate the folding stability and dynamics of proteins within polyacrylamide hydrogels.

Martin Burke's research team has demonstrated that a small molecule can transport iron in human cells and live animals when proteins that normally do the same job are missing, a condition that often causes severe anemia in patients.

Paul Hergenrother's team reports that they now know how to build a molecular Trojan horse that can penetrate gram-negative bacteria, solving a problem that for decades has stalled the development of effective new antibiotics against these increasingly drug-resistant microbes.