A team of collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill won Phase 1 of the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN)-sponsored Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Active AI Planners for Chemistry/Materials Optimization and Discovery Grand Challenge.

This week’s issue of Physical Review Letters (PRL) features the article “Electronic Excitation Response of DNA to High-energy Proton Radiation in Water” by Chris Shepard, Dr. Dillon Yost, and Professor Yosuke Kanai.

Welcome our newest faculty member, Elisa Pieri.

Jack Sundberg has created a software to help chemists uncover the best materials for their experiments — a potential game-changer for minimizing time and costs.

Herein, we demonstrate that substantial SOA, including organosulfates, are formed on acidic sodium sulfate particles (pH = 1.4 ± 0.1) via controlled laboratory experiments.

In this Perspective, we at first provide an overview of the four pathways currently available in the literature to tackle the matter, including orbital-free density functional theory, conceptual density functional theory, direct use of density-associated quantities, and the information-theoretic approach. Then, we highlight several recent advances of employing these approaches to realize new understandings for chemical concepts such as covalent bonding, noncovalent interactions, cooperation, frustration, homochirality, chirality hierarchy, electrophilicity, nucleophilicity, regioselectivity, and stereoselectivity.

Here, we report the evaluation and implementation of the common industrial enzyme, microbial transglutaminase (mTG), as a versatile biocatalyst for cyclization of mRNA display peptide libraries via lysine-to-glutamine isopeptide bonds.

This work puts forth a strategy for interfacing molecular catalysts to p-type semiconductors and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance for photoelectrochemical CO2 reduction to CO and methanol.