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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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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Dynamic covalent chemistry (DCC) offers a powerful approach for the controlled synthesis of organic molecules with interesting structures and/or properties. It describes reactions that involve th...
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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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Lung surfactant (LS) is a lipid-protein mixture that coats the internal surface of the lungs. It reduces the work of breathing by helping to keep air sacs open and stable. Deficient or dysfunctional L...
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Cancers cause about 15 percent of all human deaths worldwide, are not fully understood and defy efficient therapy. Early detection and treatment can improve survival rates and one promising strategy i...
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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 prot...
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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. M...
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