This learning object focuses on a recent publication (Acta Crystallographia 2014, C70, 260 -266) by the Collins research group in the Department of Chemistry at The College of Wooster. Specifically, the paper evaluates the coordination diversity of a N-donor ligand, 2-phenyl-1,10-phenanthroline(pnp) with three new pnp-metal complexes containing Au(III), Cu(II), and Pd(II) metal centers.
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.
Thanks to information first provided to me by Prof. Brian M. Hoffman, Northwestern University, I believe that the first documented use of the term "bioinorganic chemistry" occurred at a meeting held at Virginia Tech (VPI&SU) in June, 1970. This meeting was jointly organized with Canadian researchers and was thus an international meeting.
This meeting resulted in an Advances in Chemistry Series book, which has the following URL:
A literature discussion based on an interesting paper from Bernhard and Albrecht about a catalytic water oxidation promoted by irdium complexes featuring abnormal/mesoionic NHC ligands.
I used this in an upper-level Organometallics course after discussing NHC ligands in class.
During my junior/senior level inorganic course, we did several guided literature discussions over the course of the semester where the students read papers and answered a series of questions based on them (some from this site!). As part of my take home final exam, I gave the students an open choice literature analysis question where they had the chance to integrate topics from the semester into their interpretation of a recent paper of their own choice from Inorganic Chemistry, this time with limited guidance.
Students in a half-credit nanomaterials chemistry course read an article describing the electrochemical deposition of BiVO4 (Kyoung-Shin Choi and Jason A. Seabold, “Efficient and Stable Photo-Oxidation of Water by a Bismuth Vanadate Photoanode Coupled with an Iron Oxyhydroxide Oxygen Evolution Catalyst” J. Am. Chem. Soc.
I modified the Barb Reisner/Joanne Stewart/Maggie Geselbracht First Day TOC activity (https://www.ionicviper.org/class-activity/introducing-inorganic-chemist…) to take advantage of the quarterly list of Top 10 Most Read articles that IC sends out. This is delivered to me as an email from ACS pubs and I am sure that it is available to anyone who wished to subscribe to the updates. I have attached a pdf copy of the August 2013 update as an example.
This literature discussion is based off a Nature article by Buck, Bondi, and Schaak (Buck, M.; Bondi, J.; Schaak, R. Nat Chem 2012, 4, (1), 37-44 DOI: 10.1038/NCHEM.1195). It spans topics of solid state, crystallography, characterization techniques, and comparing inorganic to organic synthesis.