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XXVIII International Materials Research Congress

I just came back from beautiful Cancun where I attended for the third time the IMRC conference invited by my good friend and awesome collaborator Dr. Eddie López-Honorato, who once again pulled off the organization of a wonderful symposium on materials with environmental applications.

Dr. López-Honorato and I have been working for a number of years now on the design application of various kinds of materials that can eliminate arsenic species from drinking water supplies, an ever present problem in northern Mexico in South West US. So far we have successfully explored the idea of using calix[n]arenes hosts for various arsenic (V) oxides and their derivatives, but now his group has been thoroughly exploring the use of graphene and graphene oxide (GO) to perform the task.

Our joint work is a wonderful example of what theory and experiment and achieve when working hand-in-hand. During this invited talk I had the opportunity to speak about the modeling side of graphene oxide, in which we’ve been able to rationalize why polar solvents seem to be -counterintuitively- more efficient than non-polar solvents to exfoliate graphene sheets from graphite through attrition milling, as well as to understand the electronic mechanism by which UV light radiation degrades GO without significantly diminishing there arsenic-adsorbing properties. All these results are part of an upcoming paper so more details will come ahead.

Thanks to Dr. Eddie López for his invitation and the opportunity provided to meet old friends and make new ones within the wonderful world of scientific collaborations.

Posted in Collaborations, Inorganic Chemistry, Sustainability, Talks

Mexican Phys.Chem. Meeting XVth edition

Nov 21

Posted by joaquinbarroso

For the fifth year in a row my research group has participated in this traditional meeting on theoretical and computational chemistry, now at the beautiful city of Merida in southeastern Mexico.

Several distinguished international guests included Profs. Jose Luis Mendoza (Florida State University), Adrián Roitberg (University of Florida), Vincent Ortiz (Auburn University) and Paul Ayers (McMaster U. Canada); Their contributions rounded up nicely those of household names like Drs. Alberto Vela, Gabriel Merino (CINVESTAV) (the latter was also the main organizer), Jesus Hernández-Trujillo (UNAM), Jose Luis Gazquez (UAM-I), Óscar Jimenez (Guanajuato), and so many others who were also present.

My students presented four posters summarized below:

1) Maru Sandoval and Gustavo Mondragón on Photosynthesis, particularly the search for exciton transference mechanisms in both natural and theoretical arrangements of photosynthetic pigments. Some very exciting results have been observed; their publication is really near.

2) Raúl Torres and Gustavo Mondragón presented their work on arsenic removing calixarenes, published earlier this year, and the extension of said work to As(III) acids. Graphene oxide is now considered in our simulations as per the experimental work of our colleagues, Prof. Reyes Sierra and Prof. Eddie Lopez-Honorato.

3) Marco Diaz, Guillermo Caballero, Gustavo Mondragón and Raúl Torres had this poster on the calculation of sigma holes as descriptors for predicting pka values in organic acids. Their +1600 calculations project has found the best levels of theory (and ruled out some like B3LYP, of course) with some nice correlations. Yet, much work is still to be done but we’re on the right track.

4) Durbis Castillo presented his work on molecular docking and dynamics of a large library of HIV-1 entry inhibitors for which he uses the suite MAESTRO as a continuation of another project of ours. His enormous library is now in the hundredths of thousands and although we’re facing some technical difficulties, Durbis is thriving in his search. This is our first serious attempt towards a more mature drug discovery project; a manuscript should be ready in the first part of next year.