Thursday, January 28, 2016

Manganese Electrocatalysts with Bulky Bipyridine Ligands #chempaperaday 259

This is a really cool and interesting paper where Mg2+ ions are used with the Mn catalysts. The authors say it's a "rare" example. I wish they cited the other examples. Anyway,  I think it's an amazing paper with beautiful looking data. And if you like coordination chemistry, I am sure you'll like the catalysts themselves too. I don't know much about electrochemistry, but the results are still impressive to me.



http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.5b12215

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

The Heroes of CRISPR #chempaperaday 258

By far the best article to explain what CRISPR is and the history of it. Most people (even scientists I know) mention CRISPR with the names Doudna-Carpentier-Zhang. I've tried to read about CRISPR on wikipedia and I also read some review articles to really see how it was discovered. But, as you'll also confirm it is really hard to find a source that explains everything in chronological order and in simple terms. I know some biology but I am not molecular biologist. When an article goes in too many details, I get lost. So, this article REALLY helped me to read the history of it. It is unbelievable how many early researchers' papers got rejected even without reviews! Tells a lot about the journal/author/lab names. Really sad! But, it looks like it's how publishing works. All those early researchers I think deserve more credit than the three I mentioned above. They spent years to understand what these repeats are for and the mechanism that goes with the process. 


It is a really nice read and ANYONE can understand this article.