Chemistry

Gevo, a maker of bio-based isobutanol, is now actually making isobutanol. It says something that a publicly-traded company has been not making its commercial product for some months. The problem was a bug in the production system – technically a microbe – a microbe other than the one (a yeast) that was supposed to be making isobutanol. I spoke with Gevo's CEO Pat Gruber yesterday at the BIO show in Montreal. He was rather forthright about what happened. First, they were running the plant at full scale with their own yeast and had their separation process running. They were producing truckloads of isobutanol. The facility had previously been an ethanol fermentation plant. With the new operating conditions, a dormant microbe sprang to life, contaminating the process. The product was still being made but the company decided to shut down the plant and decontaminate it. “We had to identify the sources of the contaminant, change the pipes, sanitize the equipment, train the staff and modify the operating conditions to favor our yeast,” Gruber recounted. He emphasized that these plants are not sterile like a pharma plant would be. Instead, vectors of contamination are controlled so they stay at very low levels. When I wrote about biobased chemicals last summer, analysts held out Gevo as an example of a success story. It was shortly after the story ran that Gevo stopped its process at its Luverne, Minn. plant due to problems with contamination. The episode shows the kind of growing pains that the industry and its followers are learning to anticipate and accept. Other companies might face different kinds of growing pains – for Gevo there was what is called technical risk. Other firms are making chemicals such as biosuccinic acid. They also face a market risk because for most applications their product is not a drop in raw material, so downstream customers must adopt it. This year is the tenth anniversary of the World Congress for Industrial Technology. Historically, it seems to take about a decade for a new chemical concept to reach commercialization, and then some more time to penetrate new markets. This makes 2013 a very interesting year for the biobased chemical industry. Related Posts:SoloPower, Gevo: Can a capital-light strategy save…Making Markets for Bio-based Fuels and ChemicalsAnd More Coming in Biobased ChemicalsCoke Ups The PlantBottle AnteSay Hello to Two New Microbial Employees

Did you have fun playing Wordle Chem Challenge One and Two?This one kicks up the difficulty another notch. I've searched through the Nobel Prize website, and grabbed the press release / presentation speech (pre-1972) for several laureates. Can you piece together who's who?(Note: As in past challenges, I've stripped out the names of the winners, as well as certain non-helpful terms - URL, website, etc.)Entry 1Entry 2Entry 3Entry 4Entry 5Entry 6Entry 7Entry 8Entry 9Think you know 'em? Leave answers in the comments!

Apparently, the Guiding Movement is to upgrade its pledge that all members must make when they join. Currently they vow to: "to love my God, to serve my Queen and my country" That obviously only applies to people of faith and those with a female monarch…and indeed compromises the integrity of those girls without fixed national domicile. So, after consultation the century-old organisation is planning a bit of a rewording, dropping references to both spiritual and earthly autocrats as well as geography it seems. The pledge will now contain the line: "be true to myself and develop my beliefs" Now, being true to oneself is fine and developing one's beliefs is okay (ish), but the latter still smacks of religion, unicorns and fairy dust, couldn't they have made version 2.0 say something like: "be true to myself and develop my understanding of the universe through a rational, evidence-based approach to reality" That would be much more fitting four our age and avoid that crushingly egotistical phrase “develop my beliefs”. BBC News – God vow dropped from Girlguiding UK promise. Guiding pledge 2.0 dismisses God and the Queen is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom Subscribe to our Email Newsletter

I know we're only six months into 2013, but I'm calling it:GEARS are the "hot" item to have in your graphical abstract this summer!Source: Chem Rev. 2013, ASAPSource: JACS 2013, 118-121Source: Chem. Sci. 2013, Advance ArticleAnybody know when it became popular to depict cascade / multi-step reactions as Rube Goldberg devices?Readers: Seen any more "industrialized" abstracts? Send 'em my way!

New class of cholesterol-appended alkynylplatinum(II) complexes shows great versatility to respond to external stimuli

Did you have fun playing the first Wordle chemist challenge?I recall garnering some good-natured criticism, when I counted papers, for only including male chemists in the first go-'round. In the spirit of equality, here's three more Wordles for well-known female organic chemists!Entry 6Entry 7Entry 8Submit your answers in the comments!

I've been meaning for some time to put up some new photos on the site, what with the original one being over ten years old by now. So here we are - a progress through time. The beard remains a constant, and I still have the T. S. Eliot paperback that I'm reading in the 1983 shot. That's an old flash column next to me, drying out because I was too lazy to clean it out, and some TLC plates on the bench. I was doing carbohydrate chemistry, forming nitrones and doing cycloadditions, and I'm not at all sure that I've ever done a nitrone reaction since!

BRSM wrote a fun post today analyzing my blog's content using Wordle, an infotainment app for gauging word frequency (really? Really.)I thought I'd extend the concept a bit, and turn Wordle loose on some unsuspecting academics. Below, I've shown five graphics culled from the "Publications" page of five well-known synthetic organic chemists - minus a few* common words.I've removed the main author's name from each, but can you still guess who they are?Entry 1Entry 2Entry 3Entry 4Entry 5Leave a guess in the comments...if you dare!*Supporting Information, Chem, Author name, pdf

Research Integrity: Former GlaxoSmithKline R&D leader in China claims data mixup was inadvertent

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com title: "The origin of the name" - originally published 6/17/2013 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!