We’ve just had our latest paper published in RSC Digital Discovery! This is the result of Luokun’s brief but very productive internship in the group last year (separate blog post about his experience in the group). Luckily for us, Luokun has been offered a PhD position and will be staying with us, so plenty more cool science to look forward to!

What’s this paper really about?

One of our guiding principles in the group is that realising the full potential of digitisation requires a fresh look not just at what reacts with what, but also where this happens and what else is around. Nature is the master of surrounding reactivity with the right environment: just look at enzymes and how their active sites/prosthetic groups are nestled within a much larger structure; or how hopelessly impossible it seems for cellular processes to continue without the cell’s many membranes and modes of compartmentalising its activities. Containers can be smart — instead of being totally impermeable they can let certain things in/out but keep other from entering or leaving. And they don’t always have to be large like traditional glass containers in chemistry. In fact, for permeable containers being small allows molecules to reach the interior via diffusion (their random jittery movement), do something exciting, and then either leave or accumulate and build up like pearls in an oyster!

Our digital aerosol reactor, built entirely in-house, provides a way to produce millions of tiny chemical droplets and study their reactions. Digitizing our aerosol setup means tiny chemical “packets” can be released according to a computer program with very precise control over when and how much solution is sprayed. Our paper binds this progress with a way to turn these tiny liquid droplets into something more like a primitive cell. For this, we take advantage of gel-formation between alginate — a large molecule derived from seaweed — and calcium ions. This way, not only can we generate tiny hydrogel particles, but use them as tiny reactors by preloading them with reactive compounds.

Interested? Read on to find out more about what’s possible using these microscopic reactors.

New faces in materials innovation

Luokun Zhang, former group intern returned to the group, along with two new faces, Zehua Li and Junyi Chen to complete their practical post-graduate project in advanced functional materials. Always the patient and methodical experimenter, Luokun trialled quite a few project ideas in his first couple of weeks before finally settling on generation of composite materials. Along the way, we had to build our own microscope, for which Luokun designed 3D-printed a sample stage. We both learned a lot about optics, thanks to Abhishek Sharma and Ilya Starshynov who held our hand in the process. Zehua and Junyi both explored Schiff bases this summer, using them to assemble large molecules and new materials inside our prototype aerosol reactor.

Antimicrobial resistance

For the first time, this year we hosted a Chemical Biology post-graduate student. Zixi Wu took a brave leap aboard an ambitious project where we looked into the feasibility of generating a diverse range potential new antimicrobials by exposing existing antibiotics to reactive conditions within our aerosol system. Zixi deserves extra kudos for keeping his cool on a project with many layers of unknowns. His early results pave the way for future students taking on this challenge.

From Georgia to Scotland

Mariam Kalathil visited us from warm Georgia, US as part of the Arcadia summer exchange programme. Despite never having taken courses in organic chemistry or electronics, she excelled in her project, building a one-of-a-kind experimental setup to answer a fundamental chemistry question. The goal of Mariam’s project was to find out whether the messiest chemical mixtures also produced the largest number of new chemical compounds.

Building in the workshop

Talented and extremely keen Nuffield placement student Saad Azad was busy building a motorised XY stage out of old CD/DVD drives! Saad had to pull these drives out of dead computers in electronics recycling, and control the motor moving the laser back and forth using an Arduino program. These types of stages are useful in microscopy, where they are used to scan different parts of a sample automatically.

Invisible hands

UpnaLab Phd student Josu Irisarri spent this summer in Glasgow looking at ways to control chemical droplets using sound. We tried too many mad experiments to list here but one nice Friday found a quick zap of sonic energy could extract little droplets off the surface of a petri dish of water, bringing us a step closer to the tantalising future of contact-free chemistry.

Prototypes galore

Our brilliant intern Basia Jarzabek had just finished the 3rd year of her undergraduate course in Chemistry but this summer her days were mostly spent 3D printing, laser cutting, soldering and programming. She went from never having touched CAD software to helping everyone with their parts. Aerosols particles are very sensitive to their environment, so Basia’s goal was to prototype a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment for them.

Learning from each other

Group meetings and lab time were great opportunities to learn from each other. A personal highlight was getting a fresh appreciation of how video rather than raw data can be the perfect medium for documenting experiments.

Thank you

A heartfelt thank you to every one of our brilliant students. Their curiosity, energy and positive vibes have fuelled me all summer and inspired many that they interacted with. A big thank you to everyone in the ARC who facilitated their project as well. I will miss some names, but these projects would not have been possible without the help of Maria Diana Castro Spencer, Jennifer Mathieson, Jim McIver, Mary Wong, Phil Kitson, and Lee Cronin.

More about Josu

¡Hola!

My name is Josu Irisarri and I came from Spain as a visiting researcher to learn about sound chemistry and aerosols within my 3rd PhD year. I’m really grateful for having the opportunity of sharing science, time and passion in Mehr research group at the Advance Research Center (ARC) of the University of Glasgow. I got in touch with Hessam Mehr after he came to Pamplona to visit our laboratory (UPNALAB). I was later invited to an acoustic chemistry workshop at Glasgow where I could present my research work of the past years. After that, I got on board into this lovely journey.

This experience will be crucial not only for my personal career but also for developing my transversal skills, such as, multicultural communication or networking. Here in the ARC there are researcher from many different countries all around the world with whom I’m always enjoying good conversations.  My current main interests are in human computer interaction and contactless haptics and I’m willing to spread my maker and technical knowledge among this laboratory family.

Taking black coffee with hot milk in a glass with ice cubes is my favourite activity when sited on a terrace surrounded by friends and sunny nice day. You can find me hiking the highest mountains of Scotland or visiting the mysterious lakes and islands around. Sometime I like to stop for local beer and food or trying to pronounce right the Scottish accent with words like “Hiya”, “Awright”, “Wee”, “Hapnin” or “Edinbruh”. The climate isn’t the best, although since I’m here it is mainly sunny. They say that I have brought the good weather somehow.

¡Hasta la vista!

Fellow scientist will be familiar with the perks of our job, the moments of learning, discovery, and sharing that keep us going. Somewhat paradoxically, though, one aspect of academic life that I rarely look forward to is going to conferences.

It may be my short attention span or introverted character, but I’ve found it difficult to enjoy the prevalent maximalist approach to conferences: hundreds of participants often in cliques, countless hour-long talks across multiple tracks, and sessions fuelled by coffee and stretching into the late evening. I often end up coming back confused and exhausted, only remembering the first keynote perhaps and a couple of awkward nods at coffee break.

When the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) funded my proposal for an interdisciplinary research workshop, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to channel these conference gripes into a new more minimalist format focusing on a different set of goals:

• Small, interdisciplinary crowd: We wanted to avoid the idea of most participants being nameless strangers to each other. Not only would everyone get to meet each other regardless of their career stage, they would also get a chance to share their unique trajectory.
• Interactivity: No keynotes; everyone given 10 minutes to introduce themselves, with another 10 minutes to pitch an interesting research challenge to the audience or vice versa.

• Trust: Having your ideas-in-progress “scooped” at conferences is not an unfamiliar experience. Can overlap in research interests be channeled towards collaboration rather than competition?
• Looking forward: Rather than showcasing achievements, we wanted everyone to share just enough of their background and areas of interest to catalyse forging new collaborations and sketching joint projects.
• Challenging comfort zones: Everyone should feel slightly outside the comfort zone of their expertise so the discussion is not dominated by one group or field, and ideas can flow freely.
• Removing financial barriers: Registration, travel and accommodation expenses often stop students and early career academics from attending. Generous RSE funding allowed us to subsidise their participation resulting in a more even mix of career stages.

Who participated?

Researchers from 5 European universities came to Glasgow. We also had a good spread of disciplines, including human computer interaction, non-destructive testing, microfluidics, complex systems, physical acoustics, and various flavours of chemistry.

Organisation details

A quick rundown that might be useful for anyone planning a small interdisciplinary academic event:

• RSE Research Workshop application was submitted 28th March 2023 and awarded 8th June 2023.
• Before submitting, I spoke to collaborators in Bristol and Pamplona, who kindly agreed to be core participants.
• With their input, I made a shortlist of UK and Europe labs that may interface with or be interested in the workshop theme
• Initial dates and draft list of participants: October 2023
• November and December were busy months, so I only got round to booking rooms in the ARC building in January. It was almost too late but we managed to find rooms/times that worked. Note to self: Don’t underestimate the level of activity in the ARC.
• A month before the event, I booked catering via the University. We also booked everyone’s hotel rooms, which was painless once we had final confirmation from participants.

How did it go?

To summarise my point of view, this was one of the most fun events that I have ever taken part in. Beyond preparing a brief draft agenda (available here), there was very little organisation to do, with just enough structure to set things in motion initially. From the beginning, discussions flowed naturally and everyone seemed bond quickly. The programme was spontaneous and dynamic, without ever feeling chaotic.

Verbal feedback from participants during the workshop was very encouraging, and our online feedback form was filled with positive comments.

Acknowledgements

This workshop would not have been possible without the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Research Workshop grant. Without the RSE’s reputation and generous financial backing to support us, it is difficult to imagine bring such a diverse crowd of interdisciplinary research leaders to Glasgow.

I would like to thank Prof Bruce Drinkwater and Dr Asier Marzo for their support and advice. Their contributions predate the grant application that made this workshop possible.

Optimisation is a big part of what chemists spend their time and energy on, in research as well as industry, so accelerating and automating it is of course quite useful. Extending the XDL chemical programming language for optimisation — in addition to synthesis, which was its initial focus — is another highlight and a development that unlocks new directions for digital chemistry. I want to highlight a third achievement, though: mapping out a path between discovery and optimisation.

If you’ve ever seen an odd trace signal in your crude NMR or a curious m/z in the mass spectrum of your reaction mixture and felt tempted to pick up a magnifying glass and dig deeper, amplify that blip in your spectrum and find out what it really is then you know exactly what I am talking about. If only we knew the right conditions to make enough of the trace impurity and isolate it! The unexpected compound could lead us to a whole new reaction or at least a new compound, and especially because you didn’t expect to see your impurity in the first place this compound is more likely to be interesting than something you did expect.

It was a great pleasure to be part of the team working on this project between 2020 and 2021. One interesting technical challenge was to automate our Agilent HPLC system so separations could run round the clock without wasting lots of solvent and we came up with a fun hack that I may write about in the future. Conceptually though, building a bridge between discovery and optimisation stands out as the paper’s most enduring contribution to me.