Chemistry

Home » Jenkins
Tag: Jenkins
chemistry data visualized

Jenkins Lab Published in Angewandte Chemie

by

The Jenkins Lab published their research “Giving Gold Wings: Ultrabright and Fragmentation Free Mass Spectrometry Reporters for Barcoding, Bioconjugation Monitoring, and Data Storage” in the international journal Angewandte Chemie. Graduate students Isabel Jensen and Gurkiran Kaur were co-authors on the piece. 

The widespread application of laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (LDI-MS) highlights the need for a bright and multiplexable labeling platform. While ligand-capped Au nanoparticles (AuNPs) have emerged as a promising LDI-MS contrast agent, the predominant thiol ligands suffer from low ion yields and extensive fragmentation.

In this work, they developed a N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) ligand platform that enhances AuNP LDI-MS performance. NHC scaffolds are tuned to generate barcoded AuNPs which, when benchmarked against thiol-AuNPs, are bright mass tags and form unfragmented ions in high yield. To illustrate the transformative potential of NHC ligands, the mass tags were employed in three orthogonal applications: monitoring a bioconjugation reaction, performing multiplexed imaging, and storing and reading encoded information.

These results demonstrate that NHC-nanoparticle systems are an ideal platform for LDI-MS and greatly broaden the scope of nanoparticle contrast agents.

chemistry data visualized

Jenkins Group Published in Chemical Science

by

The Jenkins Lab published their research “Statistical copolymer metal organic nanotubes” in the journal Chemical Science. Graduate student Jacob Barrett co-authored the publication.

Metal–organic nanotubes (MONTs) are 1-dimensional crystalline porous materials that are formed from ligands and metals in a manner identical to more typical 3-dimensional metal–organic frameworks (MOFs). MONTs form anisotropically in one dimension making them excellent candidates for linker engineering for control of chemical composition and spacing.

A novel series of MONTs was synthesized utilizing a mixture of 1,2,4-ditriazole ligands containing both a fully protonated aryl moiety and its tetrafluorinated analog in ratios of, 0 : 1, 1 : 4, 1 : 1, 4 : 1, and 1 : 0, respectively. All MONTs were characterized by both bulk and nanoscale measurements, including SCXRD, PXRD, ssNMR and TEM, to determine the resulting co-polymer architecture (alternating, block, or statistical) and the ligand ratios in the solid materials.

All characterization methods point towards statistical copolymerization of the materials in a manner analogous to 3D MOFs, all of which notably could be achieved without destructive analytical methods.