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!