Blog Archives
A New Graduate Student
With pleasure I announce that last week our very own Gustavo “Gus” Mondragón became the fifth undergraduate student from my lab to defend his BSc thesis and it has to be said that he did it admirably so.
Gus has been working with us for about a year now and during this time he not only worked on his thesis calculating excited states for bacteriochlorophyl pigments but also helped us finishing some series of calculations on calix[n]arene complexes of Arsenic (V) acids, which granted him the possibility to apear as a co-author of the manuscript recently published in JIPH. Back in that study he calculated the interaction energies between a family of calix macrocycles and arsenic acid derivatives in order to develop a suitable extracting agent.
For his BSc thesis, Gus reproduced the UV-Vis absorption spectra of bacteriochlorophyll-a pigments found in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex of photosynthetic purple bacteria using Time Dependent Density Functional Theory (TD-DFT) with various levels of theory, with PBEPBE yielding the best results among the tried set. These calculations were performed at the crystallographic conformation and at the optimized structure, also, in vacuo results were compared to those in implicit solvent (SMD, MeOH). He will now move towards his masters where he will further continue our research on photosynthesis.
Thank you, Gustavo, for your hard work and your sense of humor. Congratulations on this step and may many more successes come your way.
Internal Symposium at CCIQS – 2016 edition
Having a symposium right after the winter holidays is a great way to get back in touch with colleagues and students; we get to hear how their work is progressing and more importantly I get forced to become focused once again after a few weeks of just not paying much attention to anything related to work.
This year our group has happily gained some additions and sadly seen some others leave in search of a better future. María Eugenia “Maru” Sandoval gave a talk on the work she did on Singlet Fission (SF) in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex during a three month stay at the Basque Country University in Spain under the supervision of Dr. David Casanova. Aside her calculations regarding Förster theory and a modification to Marcus’ equation, Singlet Fission was explored by her as a possible mechanism in which the Photosynthetic complex FMO might transfer solar energy from the antennae to the reaction center; one that might explain the high efficiency of it.
SF is a fascinating phenomenon: So you get an excited state S1 for a molecule1 that has been struck with a suitable photon; this excited state can either radiate back to the ground state (S0) but if there were two degenerate and coupled triplets whose energies are similar to half the S1 energy then the excited state might decay into [TT]1, hence singlet fission. In some cases (e.g. polyacene crystals) one of these triplets might be located in an adjacent molecule, this creates a hole in a second molecule due to the same single photon! This means creating twice the current albeit at half the voltage in photovoltaic materials. Maru has explored the possibility of SF occurring in natural systems and we think we might be on to something; she will defend her masters thesis any day now and we should see a publication later on this year. After that, she is pondering a few interesting options for her PhD.
On the poster session, our lab was represented by Marycarmen Reséndiz, Gustavo Mondragón and Guillermo Caballero. Durbis Pazos just now joined our group so he didn’t have to present a poster but nevertheless showed up gladly to support his colleagues. Gustavo will work on other aspects regarding the photochemistry of the FMO complex while Marycarmen is working on calculating the electronic interactions of chemically modified nucleotides when incorporated into DNA strands. Guillermo had a poster on his calculations for another reaction mechanism that caught his eye while still working with the experimentalists. I’m pleased to say that Guillermo is close to being published and also close to leaving us in order to get a PhD in a prestigious university that shall remain unnamed.
Thank you guys for keeping up the good work and maintaining the quality of the research we do, here is to a year full of success both in and out of the lab! Any success this lab has is due to you.
Singlet Fission in the Fenna-Matthews-Olson Complex – A Talk
Last week at the congress of the Mexican Society of Chemistry I presented some of our results in the study of photosynthesis. Below I embeded the talk. Unfortunately for the wider audience of this blog, the talk is in Spanish (if anyone out there is willing to make subtitles for it I’ll hire you on the spot!)
The slides are also in Spanish although they should be easier to follow for non-Spanish speakers and they are uploaded in SlideShare at this link.
A big thank you to Maria Eugenia “Maru” Sandoval for all the hard work and time invested in this project!
Thanks for clicking!
