Blog Archives
Another Great Year at the Lab! 2017
2017 was a complicated year for various reasons here in Mexico (and some personal health issues) but nonetheless I’m very proud of the performance of everyone at the lab whose hard work and great skills keep pushing our research forward.
Four new members joined the team and have presented their work at the national meeting for CompChem for the first time. Also, for the first time, one of my students, Gustavo Mondragón, gave a talk at this meeting with great success about his research on the Fenna Matthews Olson complex of photosynthetic bacteria.
The opportunity to attend WATOC at Munich presented me the great chance to meet wonderful people from around the world and was even kindly and undeservingly invited to write the prologue for an introductory DFT book by Prof. Pedro Cerón from Spain. I hope to Jeep up with the collaborations abroad such as the one with the Mirkin group at Nortgwestern and the one with my dear friend Kunsagi-Mate Sándor at Pecsi Tudomanyegyetem (Hungary), among many others; I’m thankful for their trust in our capabilities.
Two members got their BSc degrees, Marco an Durbis, the latter also single handedly paved the way for us to develop a new research line on the in silico drug developing front; his relentless work has also been praised by the QSAR team at the Institute of Chemistry with which he has collaborated by performing toxicity calculations for the agrochemical industry as well as by designing educational courses aimed to the dissemination of our work and QSAR in general among regulatory offices and potential clients. We’re sad to see him go next fall but at the same time we’re glad to know his scientific skills will further develop.
I cannot thank the team enough: Alejandra Barrera, Gustavo Mondragón, Durbis Castillo, Fernando Uribe, Juan Guzman, Alberto Olmedo, Eduardo Cruz, Ricardo Loaiza and Marco Garcia; may 2018 be a great year for all of you.
And to all the readers thank you for your kind words, I’m glad this little space which is about to become nine years old is regarded as useful; to all of you I wish a great 2018!
-
- three UBPs
XVI Mexican Meeting on Phys.Chem.
A yearly tradition of this Comp.Chem. lab and many others throughout our nation is to attend the Mexican Meeting on Theoretical Physical Chemistry to share news, progress and also a few drinks and laughs. This year the RMFQT was held in Puebla and although unfortunately I was not able to attend this lab was proudly represented by its current members. Gustavo Mondragón gave a talk about his progress on his photosynthesis research linking to the previous work of María Eugenia Sandoval already presented in previous editions; kudos to Gustavo for performing remarkably and thanks to all those who gave us their valuable feedback and criticism. Also, five posters were presented successfully, I can only thank the entire team for representing our laboratory in such an admirable way, and a special mention to the junior members, I hope this was the first of many scientific events they attend and may you deeply enjoy each one of them.
Among the invited speakers, the RMFQT had the honor to welcome Prof. John Perdew (yes, the P in PBE); the team took the opportunity of getting a lovely picture with him.
Here is the official presentation of the newest members of our group:
Alejandra Barrera (hyperpolarizabilty calculations on hypothetical poly-calyx[n]arenes for the search of NLO materials)
Fernando Uribe (Interaction energy calculations for non-canonical nucleotides)
Juan Guzmán (Reaction mechanisms calculations for catalyzed organic reactions)
We thank the organizing committee for giving us the opportunity to actively participate in this edition of the RMFQT, we eagerly await for next year as every year.
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.
XIth Mexican Reunion on Theoretical Physical Chemistry
For over a decade these meetings have gathered theoretical chemists every year to share and comment their current work and to also give students the opportunity to interact with experienced researchers, some of which in turn were even students of Prof. Robert Parr, Prof. Richard Bader or Prof. Per Olov Löwdin. This year the Mexican Meeting on Theoretical Physical Chemistry took place last weekend in Toluca, where CCIQS is located. You can find links to this and previous meetings here. We participated with a poster which is presented below (in Spanish, sorry) about our current research on the development of calixarenes and tia-calixarenes as drug carriers. In this particular case, we presented our study with the drug IMATINIB (Gleevec as branded by Novartis), a powerful tyrosinkynase inhibitor widely employed in the treatment of Leukaemia.
The International Journal of Quantum Chemistry is dedicating an issue to this reunion. As always, this meeting posed a great opportunity to reconnect with old friends, teachers, and colleagues as well as to make new acquaintances; my favourite session is still the beer session after all the seminars! Kudos to María Eugenia “Maru” Sandoval-Salinas for this poster and the positive response it generated.
