Research Highlights
Agapie Group
Making Plastic from Carbon Dioxide, Water, and Electricity
Reporting in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Agapie and a team of Caltech chemists have developed a system that uses electricity from sustainable sources to carry out what is known as artificial photosynthesis—the chemical conversion of carbon dioxide (CO2) into molecules that are useful for making more complex compounds such as ethylene and carbon monoxide without plants. The new system then feeds those chemicals into a second catalytic loop that yields industrially useful plastics called polyketones, which are known for their strength, durability, and thermal stability, making them ideal for applications ranging from adhesives to car parts and from sports equipment to industrial piping.
Cushing Lab
Dynamic Competition between Hubbard and Superexchange Interactions Selectively Localizes Electrons and Holes through Polarons
In addition to understanding how strong electronic and spin correlations can control strong electron–phonon coupling, these experiments separately measure electron and hole polaron interactions on neighboring metal centers for the first time, providing insight into a large range of charge-transfer and Mott–Hubbard insulators.
Nelson Lab
Microcrystal Electron Diffraction-Guided Discovery of Fungal Metabolites
Nature remains a vast repository of complex and functional metabolites whose structural characterization continues to drive innovations in pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and materials science. The cryogenic electron microscopy (cryoEM) method, microcrystal electron diffraction (microED, a 3D ED technique), has emerged as a powerful tool to structurally characterize small molecules. Despite this emerging role in structural chemistry, the cost and throughput of microED have limited its application in the discovery of natural products (NPs). While recent advances in sample preparation (e.g., arrayED) have provided a conceptual framework to address these challenges, they have remained unproven. Herein, we report the arrayED-driven discovery of a structurally unprecedented family of NPs (zopalides A–E), a muurolane-type sesquiterpene glycoside (rhytidoside A), aspergillicin analogs (aspergillicins H and I), and four crystal structures of previously reported fungal metabolites. Lastly, this the first time that the absolute stereo configuration of newly discovered NPs has been determined directly by microED alone without other methods using a small amount of sample