Determining the reactive intermediates in metalloenzymes is a very involved task, and requires drawing from many different spectroscopies and physical methods.  The facile activation and oxidation of methane to produce methanol is one of the "holy grails" of inorganic chemistry.  Strategies exist within materials science and organometallic chemistry to activate methane, but using the enzyme methane monooxygenase, nature is able to carry out this difficult reaction at ambient temperatures and pressures (and in water, too!).

For many years I have resisted using clickers, mainly because at our university there is no standard universal clicker. I wanted to keep student costs as low as possible but also desired the type of live feedback during a lecture that clicker questions can provide. In both my general chem. (200-300 students) and upper division courses (50-75 students), I now pass out 4 or 5 colored notecards on the first day of class and make sure everyone has one of each color.

This is an in class exercise that I use to introduce structure and magnetism to a junior/senior level course on bioinorganic chemistry. The class is cross-listed between Chemistry and Biochemistry. All of the students have had general chemistry and organic (with some exposure to MO Theory). Many of the students have also had the sophomore-level inorganic course, which delves extensively into MO theory, and some of the the students have also had the senior-level course on transition metal chemistry which looks deeply at d-orbital splitting.