This Five Slides About was prepared specifically for the 2014 IONiC/VIPEr workshop Bioinorganic Applications of Coordination Chemistry held at Northwestern University July 13-18, 2014.
Anne asked the students in her junior/senior inorganic course to develop their own literature discussion learning objects and lead the rest of the class in a discussion of their article. Each student chose one article from a list of suggestions provided. Student Hayley Johnston chose this article describing a Mn-containing catalyst for carbon dioxide reduction (Jonathan M. Smieja, Matthew D. Sampson, Kyle A. Grice, Eric E. Benson, Jesse D. Froehlich, and Clifford P.
In this literature discussion, students are asked to read an article describing a series of uranyl halide compounds that contain an alkali counterion that interacts with one or more of the uranium's ligand atoms. This paper stands out as a great example of the binding preferences of acids and bases, and can be explained very well using simple HSAB concepts.
This in class activity is designed to introduce students to how amino acid side chains can coordinate metal ions in proteins. It guides students through the exploration of several metal binding sites in proteins using the Ligand Explorer program on the Protein Data Bank (PDB) website. Essentially, it is a way for them to use the PDB to “discover” the information generally presented on this topic in the introductory chapters of bioinorganic textbooks. At the end it asks students to think about Hard Soft Acid Base theory and to see how that can be applied to the binding of metals in protei
This is a 90 minute talk by Fraser Armstrong of Oxford University (http://armstrong.chem.ox.ac.uk) explaining the electrochemistry of proteins immobilized on surfaces. The talk was presented at the 3rd Bioinorganic Workshop in 2014 at Pennsylvania State University. The talk contains an excellent basic tutorial on simple electron transfer on immobilized substrates using simple iron sulfur proteins as the primary example.
Introducing you to 3DMolSym: A Web Resource for Teaching Molecular Symmetry that uses Adobe Shockwave for Visualizations and Animations.
Note there is a slight difference when operating this resource on a Mac or in a Windows Operating Systerm. On a Mac if you don't change an item (any item) in the pull down menu on the right when the resouce opens, the selection of molecules will be frame shifted by one molecule. An easy fix is described in the Description below.
I have provided a link to a Web Resource: The Strucutre and Symmetry of Metal Tris Chelates which I developed several years ago with my collegue Henry Rzepa from Imperial College London (and which was posted as Web Ware on the Jourmal of Chemical Education Website and is not longer available to view there). The Web site uses 3D images of known molecules and scripted commands to teach about the symmetry elements and operations in these molecules. Instruction is also given on assigning absolute configurations and ligand twist conformations. Animations of the Bailar Twist and Ray Dutt Mech
This is an in-class activity that I made to help students in my second semester general chemistry course work through some aspects of color and coordination chemistry. The activity was performed with a demonstration of color for nickel coordination complexes (ligands: water, ethylenediamine, and ammonia). I also included equilibria and thermodynamics as those concepts apply to coordination compounds at the introductory level. This served as a review of the concepts as well.
Every day when I teach Inorganic Chemistry (and in most of my problem sets and take home exams) I create Web pages to show 3D images of selected molecules to my students. I am a visual learner and I find the structures beautiful and informative.
In the past few months, you likely have found that web sites scripted with Jmol scripts calling a Jmol applet (which is a Java applet) are blocked.
Brief introduction to d-orbital splitting, Russell-Saunders coupling, and application to UV-Vis spectroscopy using Tanabe-Sugano diagrams