Society of Chemical Industry (SCI) College of Scholar Presentations & Networking Event

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• Prof Alan Heaton
• Wednesday 31 October 2012, 16:30-19:30
• Pfizer Lecture Theatre, Department of Chemistry, Lensfield Road, Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact John O'Toole.

Free event. Open to all.

SCI is proud to present three bright young members of its College of Scholars programme. Join us for tea and biscuits before the presentation and network afterward while enjoying drinks and nibbles.

Aditi Borka – University of Cambridge (Michele Vendruscolo Group) Choreography of RNA – The functions of macromolecules in the cell depend on their structure and dynamics. Consequently there is great interest in the development of experimental and computational techniques to understand these aspects at the atomic level. I will outline a novel approach to study the in-vitro dynamical properties of RNA at atomic resolution. This method harnesses molecular dynamics simulations with restrains derived from NMR Residual Dipolar Couplings (RDCs) on different RNA molecules. The conformational ensembles generated represent the range of structures that RNA populates in the native state. The RNA molecules that I am considering cover various aspects of RNA behaviour, including RNA -protein interactions, RNA -DNA interactions and RNA catalysis, and thus will help understand the role of dynamics in these processes.

James Frost – University of Cambridge (Prof Steve Ley Group) Total synthesis of anti-cancer natural products callipeltoside A, B and C – A highly convergent route has been developed that has allowed access to this family of natural products. This has been achieved by a) use of a high yielding approach to the pyran core; b) formation of the entire vinyl iodide containing di-ene-yne fragment in a stereospecific manner and c) union of these fragments via a diastereoselective alkenylmetal addition. This was followed by macrolactonisation to provide the common callipeltoside aglycon. Rapid construction of each sugar unit from a single commercially available starting material and subsequent attachment to the aglycon provided the entire family of the callipeltosides.

James Womack – University of Bristol (Prof Fred Manby Group) A new method of approximating many-electron integrals in explicitly-correlated methods – Chemistry is fundamentally about understanding the behaviour of electrons. Each electron interacts repulsively with every other electron in a system, and their motion is therefore said to be correlated. Accurate electronic structure calculations on chemical systems require some treatment of these correlations. Explicitly-correlated methods allow for efficient treatment of electron correlation, but also introduce numerous and complex many-electron integrals. For explicitly-correlated methods to be practically implemented, these integrals must be approximated. In this talk, I will outline a new method of approximating these integrals and why this method may present an improvement on the current state of the art.the studies towards the total synthesis and structural determination of these three natural products. The overall retrosynthetic strategy involves a late-stage olefination procedure to attach the trienoic acid sidechain to the tricyclic core thus developing a convergent strategy for the total synthesis which should allow access to a variety of analogues for further biological testing.

This event is co-hosted by Cambridge University ChemSoc.

For more information, please visit the SCI website www.soci.org

This talk is part of the SCI Cambridge Science Talks series.

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