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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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 ...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

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...
Learn More

Levulinic acid is a biomass-derived compound that can be obtained inexpensively in high yields from a variety of waste cellulose-containing materials. It has been identified as a top biomass-derived c...
Learn More

Alkanes produced from carbohydrates could provide a renewable source of transportation fuel to complement the rapidly growing production of bio-diesel from vegetable oils and animal fats.
Learn More