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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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 ...
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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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Many of the compounds used in drug discovery by pharmaceutical companies are glycosylated bacterial secondary metabolites. A glycosylated metabolite consists of a central core structure (aglycon) and ...
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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. However, c...
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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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The Staudinger ligation method for synthesizing peptides requires phosphinothiol reagents that are not commercially available. The current method for making phosphinothiols is complicated (involving f...
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Foldamers are synthetic protein oligomers with discrete and predictable folding properties akin to those of natural proteins. They provide molecular tools to investigate large-molecule interactions su...
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Selective synthesis of chiral compounds, rather than mixtures of mirror image forms (enantiomers), is an active area of chemical research. N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs) show some usefulness in cataly...
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Typically, a catalyst is required to polymerize olefins.  However, current catalysts are inefficient, complex and expensive.
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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...
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