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Barnes Wins FYCA Faculty Lead Award

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The First Year Course Academy (FYCA) provides resources, tools, and information to help UT-Knoxville instructors make a difference for students enrolled in their first-year courses. FYCA is a new initiative to equip instructors of these courses with best practices for teaching and engaging with first-year students in online, hybrid, and hyflex courses. The Office of the Provost, Teaching & Learning Innovation, the Division of Student Success, and the Office of Information Technology have partnered to make these resources and information available to instructors of the 15 highest-enrolled courses with first-year students.

These courses are:

  • Biology 101 & 150
  • Chemistry 120
  • Engineering Fundamentals 151
  • English 101 & 102
  • Geography 131
  • Geology 101
  • Psychology 110
  • Math 119, 123, 125, 141, & 130
  • Sociology 120

All of these courses are also significant for our campus because of the high drop, fail, and withdrawal rate for our students. The FYCA program is also intended to help improve these concerns and equip our instructors with the tools they need to be advocates of student success.

Department of Chemistry’s, Christiane Barnes, has received a Faculty Lead Award for the work she did with Noodle partners for the development of FYCA.

“I enjoyed working with the Noodle people this past summer.  Building the Chem 120 course shell made me look at the course material and the way we set up the course on Canvas from a different perspective,” Barnes said. “It was truly an educational experience and it gave me a better grasp on the delivery of course content when you are teaching online. We are currently working on a new Chem 130 course shell and I believe it will even be better than the one we did this past summer.”

Brantley Group Published in ACS Macro Letters

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The Brantley Group published their work “General Access to Allene-Containing Polymers Using the Skattebøl Rearrangement” in ACS Macro Letters. Primary author is Nick Galan, graduate student in the Brantley Group.

Postsynthetic modification is a powerful strategy for tuning soft materials. While methods for side-chain functionalization abound, modifications of backbone structural elements can be difficult to achieve. This challenge arises, in part, from a lack of intrinsically reactive motifs that can be installed in the main chain of a polymer. Incorporating established synthetic handles into polymer architectures is paramount for overcoming this limitation.

Allenes are salient examples of moieties that could be leveraged in a wide range of postsynthetic modifications; however, the synthesis of a polyallene has proven elusive. Using the metathesis polymer of norbornene as a model architecture, the Brantley Group have established the Skattebøl rearrangement as a facile route to polyallenes. Polymers with varying allene content (20–95%) were readily prepared in excellent yields (89–94%). These materials possess unique optical properties and can be engaged through further postsynthetic modifications. As such, polyallenes could serve as valuable platforms for developing functional soft materials.

“Our results suggest that installing allenes within soft materials could open underexplored chemical space for polymer design and modification,” Galan said. “As such, we expect that our work will serve as a general platform for developing new types of tunable or stimulus-responsive materials.”

ACGS Halloween Costume Contest

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Social events and social distancing don’t necessarily mesh very well! Due to COVID-19, ACGS has decided to do a socially distant Halloween Costume Contest to bring some very spooky cheer to the department in lieu of a fall social. All faculty, staff, lecturers, post-docs, and graduate students are invited to participate and show off their creative side!

November 2nd-9th, polls will open through email and best dressed will be chosen democratically! Monetary prizes of $100 for 1st place, $50 for 2nd, and $25/ea for 3rd, 4th, and 5th will be awarded! 

Winners Update:

1st place – Avery Blockmon and Kiman Park “Men in Black”

2nd place – Douglas Stewart “Plague Doctor”

3rd place – Megan Qualls “Mary Poppins”

4th place – Ampofo Darko “Zoom Outfit”

5th place – Eleanor Page “James from Team Rocket”

Douglas Stuart “Plague Doctor”

Abby Sallee “Graduated Cylinder”

Ampofo Darko “Zoom Outfit”

Justin Kirby “Lex Luther”

Megan Qualls “Mary Poppins”

Ryker Hill “JoJo Character”

Kerani Davidson “Ninja Turtle”

Erin Drufva “Totoro”

Avery Blockmon & Kiman Park “Men in Black”

Sam Peay “Dead Person”

Zane Vickery “Han Solo”

Maggie Powell, Sarah Hirschbeck & Bailey Eberle “H2O”

Eleanor Page “James from Team Rocket”

Nia Parker & Elizabeth O’Connell “Bring it on”

Justin Burroughs “Cowboy”

Brantley Group Published in Macromolecules

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The Brantley Group published their work “Exploring Combinatorial Approaches to Polymer Diversification” in Macromolecules. 

Diversity-oriented strategies can facilitate the rapid exploration of chemical space during small-molecule synthesis, but similar approaches are underutilized for macromolecular substrates. Expanding the repertoire of soft material manipulations to accommodate iterative diversifications could enable the design of bespoke polymers with a range of novel structures and properties.

“To explore this concept, we chose to leverage the efficiency of Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling to rapidly access an array of functionalized polystyrene surrogates from a readily accessible polystyrene-p-pinacol boronic ester,” Brain Jacobs, postdoc, said. “A variety of C(sp2) electrophiles efficiently coupled with our model polymer (51–99% functionalization) in moderate-to-good yields (44–96%). “

Optimized coupling reactions afforded products with minimal changes in overall dispersity (as determined by gel permeation chromatography), which suggested that the desired coupling occurred with good fidelity. “Select products were subjected to further modifications (e.g., Wittig olefination, reduction, imine condensation) to showcase the diverse array of reactivities that can be accessed using our strategy.” Jacobs said. 

Best Group Published in Chemistry and Physics of Lipids

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The Best Group’s article titled “Metabolic labeling of glycerophospholipids via clickable analogs derivatized at the lipid headgroup” was published in Chemistry and Physics of Lipids.

Metabolic labeling, in which substrate analogs containing diminutive tags can infiltrate biosynthetic pathways and generate labeled products in cells, has led to dramatic advancements in the means by which complex biomolecules can be detected and biological processes can be elucidated.

Within this realm, metabolic labeling of lipid products, particularly in a manner that is headgroup-specific, brings about a number of technical challenges including the complexity of lipid metabolic pathways as well as the simplicity of biosynthetic precursors to headgroup functionality. As such, only a handful of strategies for metabolic labeling of lipids have thus far been reported. However, these approaches provide enticing examples of how strategic modifications to substrate structures, particularly by introducing clickable moieties, can enable the hijacking of lipid biosynthesis.

Furthermore, early work in this field has led to an explosion in diverse applications by which these techniques have been exploited to answer key biological questions or detect and track various lipid-containing biological entities. In this article, the group reviews these efforts and emphasize recent advancements in the development and application of lipid metabolic labeling strategies.

Hazari Celebrates NCW With His 30th Annual “Magic of Chemistry Show”

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National Chemistry Week (NCW) is a community-based program of the American Chemical Society (ACS). This annual program unites ACS local sections, student chapters, technical divisions, businesses, schools, and individuals in communicating the importance of chemistry to our quality of life. NCW occurs annually during the third week of October.

The mission of NCW is to reach the public, particularly elementary and secondary school children, with positive messages about chemistry to:

  • Make a positive change in the public’s impression of chemistry;
  • Promote a mechanism for effectively mobilizing ACS local sections; and
  • Motivate the ACS membership through local section activities.

NCW 2020, October 18–24
Topic: Glues and Adhesives
Theme: Sticking with Chemistry

Hazari Celebrated NCW With His 30th Annual “Magic of Chemistry Show.”

Hazari is a retired UT chemistry professor has spent the past 30 years putting on science shows for audiences all over East Tennessee.

Campagna Gives Talk for Harvard’s MSI Seminar Series

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The Microbial Sciences Initiative (MSI) at Harvard University is an interdisciplinary science program aimed at a comprehensive understanding of the richest biological reservoir of the planet, the microbial world.

Shawn Campagna presented a talk for this series titled “Using Metabolomics to Understand the Function of Environmentally Relevant Microbial Consortia.”

 

Calhoun Lab Featured Cover in J. Phys. Chem. C

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The Calhoun Lab was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C for their research “Leaving the Limits of Linearity for Light Microscopy” and it is a perspective on the recent advances in the field of nonlinear microscopy. This article is also the featured cover for the November 12, 2020 issue.

Graduate student authors include Marea Blake and Brandon Colon.  Blake is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her current research focuses on probing small molecule-membrane interactions in living cells using nonlinear techniques such as second harmonic generation and two-photon fluorescence.

Colon received his B.S. degree (2016) in Chemistry from the University of West Florida in Pensacola, FL. He is a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee under the tutelage of Prof. Tessa Calhoun. He has been investigating the use of total internal reflection illumination geometries to apply nonlinear microscopy techniques to microfluidic samples.

In this paper, the group highlights recent developments within the past couple of years pertaining to how nonlinear microscopy methods such as transient absorption, 2D nonlinear microscopy, second order processes, and quantum microscopy are being implemented to probe different timescales, access information on interfaces and illuminate samples with novel excitation schemes. 

“Our group actually uses a few of these methods (such as TAM, SHG and TIR geometry excitation) in our lab so it was really exciting getting to portray that in this perspective and explore the directions they can grow,” Blake said.

Best Group’s Recent Work

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>Recent work in the Best Group has culminated in the development of stimuli-responsive liposomes for drug delivery designed to release therapeutic cargo when they come into contact with diseased cells, specifically based on overexpressed enzymes and reactive oxygen species. “These smart liposomes show strong prospects for advancing drug delivery by targeting therapeutics directly to the site of the disease,” Jinchao Lou, graduate student in the Best Group, said.

Liposomes are effective nanocarriers for drug delivery due to their ability to encapsulate and deliver a wide variety of therapeutic cargo to cells. Nevertheless, liposome delivery would be improved by enhancing the ability to control the release of contents within diseased cells. Toward this end, stimuli-responsive liposomes, in which the drug carrier decomposes when it comes in contact with conditions associated with disease, are of great interest for enhancing drug potency while minimizing side effects.

While various stimuli have been explored for triggering liposome release, both enzymes and reactive oxygen species (ROS) provide excellent targets due to their key roles in biology and overabundance in diseased cells. In two separate papers, the Best Group presented a general approach to enzyme‐responsive liposomes exploiting targets that are commonly aberrant in disease, including esterases, phosphatases, and β‐galactosidases (Chem. Eur. J. 2020, 26, 8597-8607), as well as an ROS-responsive liposomal delivery platform (Bioconjugate Chem. 2020, 31, 2220-2230).

In both of the cases, responsive lipids designed to target each stimulus were designed and synthesized bearing a responsive headgroup attached via a self‐immolating linker to a non‐bilayer lipid scaffold. In this way, stimulus addition triggers chemical lipid decomposition in a manner that disrupts membrane integrity and releases contents. Release properties were fully characterized by fluorescence-based dye leakage assays, dynamic light scattering and electron microscopy, among other techniques.

Due to their recent works in this field, the Best group was also invited to write a review describing advances in the design of stimuli-responsive liposome strategies for drug delivery with an eye towards emerging trends in the field (Chem. Phys. Lipids. In Press. DOI 10.1016/j.chemphyslip.2020.104966). Smart liposomes show strong prospects for advancing drug delivery by targeting drugs directly to the site of the disease.

ORI Names Campagna Interim Director of Strategic Programs

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President Randy Boyd shared some developments at the Oak Ridge Institute at UT (ORI at UT). A national search for the first executive director and vice provost of the Oak Ridge Institute at UT is underway.

Shawn Campagna
Shawn Campagna

ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia and Randy Boyd, in consultation with UT Knoxville Chancellor Donde Plowman and UT Health Science Center Chancellor Steve Schwab, have named Michelle Buchanan, ORNL deputy for science and technology, and Stacey Patterson, UT System vice president for research, as interim co-directors of ORI at UT until a director is named. Suresh Babu, a UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Advanced Manufacturing and Bredesen Center Director, will serve as ORI at UT’s interim education director. Shawn Campagna, UT Knoxville associate department head of chemistry and Director of Science Alliance, will serve as the interim director of strategic programs. Jean Mercer, UT Knoxville assistant vice chancellor for research and director of the office of sponsored programs, will serve as interim director of operations.