Having a symposium right after the winter holidays is a great way to get back in touch with colleagues and students; we get to hear how their work is progressing and more importantly I get forced to become focused once again after a few weeks of just not paying much attention to anything related to work. This year our group has happily gained some additions and sadly seen some others leave in search of a better future.

Today, on the last day of 2015, we have received great news that our latest paper regarding thr study of calixarenes as drug delivery agents has been published in the Journal of computational chemistry (10.1002/jcc.24281)   This work represents the continuation of our previous paper published last year in JCTC regarding the use of delivery agents for drugs used in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia;

Each year the Mexican community who works in the realm of computational and theoretical chemistry gathers to share the most recent work done around our country. This year, I tried to live Tweet the event and although I failed miserably in doing so -as well as in convincing others to join me- I’m trying to put together the things that caught my attention. I also tried to Storify it but I cannot embed the result here in WordPress.

In a nutshell, computational chemistry models are about depicting, reproducing and predicting the electronic-based molecular reality. I had this conversation with my students last week and at some point I drew a parallel between them and art in terms of how such reality is approached.

Sometimes you just need to optimize some fragment or moiety of your molecule for a number of reasons -whether because of its size, your current interest, or to skew the progress of a previous optimization- or maybe you want just some kind of atoms to have their positions optimized.

How do you compare the stability of two or more compounds which differ in some central atom(s)? If you simply calculate the energy of both compounds you get a misleading answer since the number of electrons is different from one to the next -in fact, the answer is not so much misleading as it is erroneous. Take compounds 1 and 2 shown in figure 1, for example.

Last week at the congress of the Mexican Society of Chemistry I presented some of our results in the study of photosynthesis. Below I embeded the talk.

Having a long calculation terminated just because it ran out of time in the queue is very frustrating;

A new publication is now available in which we calculated the binding properties of a fluorescent water-soluble chemosensor for halides which is specially sensitive for chloride. Once again, we were working in collaboration with an experimental group who is currently involved in developing all kinds of sustainable chemosensors.

Computing spectroscopic features of molecules is always an interesting challenge, specially when intermolecular contacts are into play. Take vibrational spectroscopy for instance, all the non-covalent interactions present in a solid will have an important effect on the the calculated frequencies and their intensities. However calculating the spectroscopical properties of a solid quickly becomes a daunting task.

Last Monday the School of Chemistry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico celebrated 50 years of their modern graduate studies program; as part of the celebrations a formal investiture ceremony for those of us who got our PhD’s after 1990 was organized.