With this award, the Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry Program supports the work of Professor Steven R. Kass of the University of Minnesota. The chemistry in this proposal spans a wide range and is an example of basic research intertwined with practical science. New insights into enzyme structure and function, novel materials, and reactive intermediates (which play a central role in almost all chemical transformations) will be obtained. More specifically, compounds with oppositely charged sites (i.e. zwitterions) will be probed, the reactivity of amino acids and peptides will be explored, the properties of superacids will be measured, the stability of transient compounds formed in atmospheric or combustion processes will be determined, new reagents for carrying out chemical transformations will be studied, and unusually stabilized and destabilized molecules of fundamental importance, and potential consequence in the fabrication of nanomaterials, will be investigated.
Broader Impacts. This research program spans a diverse range of activities and thus provides an excellent platform for training young scientists. The results will be of importance to the chemical industry and the scientists examining the chemistry and pollution of the atmosphere, and are routinely incorporated into ?popular? scientific journals, textbooks, reference books, and databases such as the NIST website (www.webbook.nist.gov). Insights into the workings of proteins and enzymes also may lead to new understanding and noninvasive detection methods of human diseases.
Undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral associates were supported in carrying out this project. Basic research in chemistry was performed which is intertwined with many practical aspects of science that could lead to huge societal benefits such as the preparation of new medicines and the development of noninvasive detection methods for human diseases. Our results are also important to the infrastructure of the field. New acids and catalysts were developed. In the process, a better understanding of hydrogen bonds was obtained. The resulting insights are important in the determination of biological pathways and enzyme-catalyzed reactions. They also should lead to a reevaluation of some biochemical transformations and the mode of action of others. The development of new sensors, which is actively being explored, may result from this work as well. Our research involving electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, a Noble prize winning technology and a billion dollar field, provides new insights into the ionic structures produced by this methodology. This will facilitate chemical analyses and may lead to the development of new (and early) methods for diagnosing diseases. Reaction intermediates, which are the key to most chemical processes, were also investigated. Quantitative data that appears on public websites (e.g. www.webbook.nist.gov) were reported and the limits of molecular stability were examined.
