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.
This collection highlights the learning objects used at the 2014 VIPEr workshop on the Bioinorganic Applications of Coordination Chemistry to introduce participants to the field of bioinorganic chemistry. They provide essential background information on how metals bind to proteins as well as the techniques used in the research papers presented at the workshop. A list of learning objects created at the workshop based on the current research of our expert speakers can be found at:
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
This in-class activity requires that the students read an article in The Atlantic about an interesting (and modern) case of the plague. The article provides a great platform to showcase the Inorganic side of broad societal themes like evolutionary biology, environmental and hereditary influences on disease, and the collaboration between biology, medicine, and history. The article itself contains little chemistry, but can be used to guide students into learning about iron in bioinorganic chemistry.
Accompanying article found here:
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.