BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY

BGSU in the News

Once again, work by BGSU photochemical scientists is receiving worldwide media attention. A paper by Drs. Pavel Anzenbacher and Manuel Palacios was published March 8 in the prestigious journal Nature Chemistry.

The article, “Polymer Nanofibre Junctions of Attoliter Volume Serve as Zeptomol-scale Chemical Reactors,” can be viewed at
http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nchem.125.html

In the same issue, a story appeared about the research, “Miniaturization: Chemistry at the Crossroads,” by Andrew J. deMello and Robert C.R. Wootton.

The New York Times was one of the media outlets reporting on the BGSU research. In the March 9 Science section, Henry Fountain wrote an article titled “With Fibers, Chemical Reactions on a Tiny Scale”:

In a chemical plant, the typical reaction vessel is a glass or stainless steel chamber that can hold a volume of reactants, from tens to thousands of liters.

But imagine a reactor that is smaller—much smaller, with a volume far less than a nanoliter, or a billionth of a liter. That’s the idea being developed by Pavel Anzenbacher Jr. and Manuel A. Palacios of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In a reactor of that size, potentially just a handful of molecules could combine.

For the entire Times story, visit
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/science/10obfiber.html

Among others reporting on Anzenbacher and Palacios’s findings were:

• Chemistry World: “Polymer Crossroads Act as Tiny Reactors,” by Nina Notman, published online March 8 at: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2009/March/08030901.asp.

• Chemical and Engineering News: “Miniaturization: Attoreactors from Nanofibers,” by Rachel Petkewich, published online March 9 at: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/email/html/cen_87_i10_8710notw5.html

• Technology Review: “Nanofibers Power Attoscale Chemistry: A New Way to Perform Experiments Using Just Thousands of Molecules,” by Katherine Bourzac, published March 10 at http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22264/

Last year, an article about research in Anzenbacher’s lab that appeared in the journal ChemComm also received international attention. The research was on a novel approach to detecting dangerous heavy metals in water sources.