University of Canterbury
Hororata Glow Festival
The Hororata Night Glow is held every second year and the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences has been involved since its inception in 2018 providing the public with the science behind hot air balloons and other fun things. This year’s event, held on 13 May, was attended by 11,000 adults with accompanying children and sold out well before that date.
The SPCS team was led by Graeme Plank and included Marie Squire, Chris Fitchett, Lily Herman Spahn, Dongqi Lin, Noah Simmonds, Anjali Thomas, Gokul Vishwanathan, Rhia Hewett, Lachan Smith, Justine Cottam, Dona Banerjee, Lily Williams, Emma Johnson, Henry Fitchett and Greta Fitchett and involved academic staff, technical staff, some children of staff and a good number of enthusiastic students from SPCS.
The event highlight is a concert with a light show provided by the gas burners of tethered hot air balloons. The SPCS display, held in a clear 10 x 9m clear marquee close to the stage, included static displays and hands on activities covering physics and chemistry related to balloons, pressure, movement and especially light.
A ton and a half of sugar
The Fairbanks group is celebrating the publication of its 150th peer-reviewed international journal article. The most recent paper was recently accepted for publication in Organic Letters published by the American Chemical Society (ACS):
Qiu, X.; Chong, D.; Fairbanks, A.J. Selective anomeric acetylation of unprotected sugars with acetic anhydride in water. Org. Lett. 2023, 25, 1989-1993. Read here
This paper is the latest in a sequence of protecting group free reactions of sugars in water and was, rather remarkably, described by referees as: “brilliant”; “this is an incredibly useful maneuver, that frankly shocks me hadn't been discovered already!”; “I’m really impressed by the high level of scholarship”.
On the same day as the paper was accepted, the group sadly said farewell to first author Xin Qiu, who had been a group member for almost 5 years; first completing his PhD and then as a postdoc. Xin had single-handedly pioneered much of the protecting group free chemistry developed by the group during this period, and he will be sorely missed. The group wishes him the very best with his future research career. Since then, the group has welcomed new Postdoctoral researcher, Dr Ranadeep Talukdar and new PhD student, Jude Kalan.
Carbohydrate processing enzymes in mammalian systems
We were delighted to host Professor David Vocadlo, the 2023 Ferrier Lecturer, on 6 March 2023. David is from Simon Fraser University, Canada and gave a fascinating talk on chemical biology tools for probing and perturbing carbohydrate processing enzymes in mammalian systems.
The talk focused on the major research themes of the Laboratory of Chemical Biology, centred on the design and use of chemical biology tools to probe and perturb glycans and carbohydrate processing enzymes in cells and in vivo. It included studies on the enzymes that regulate levels of the intracellular O-GlcNAc modification of proteins, the creation and characterisation of potent inhibitors of these enzymes and how these have led to industrial efforts that have successfully advanced such compounds into human clinical trials. His work is implicated in potential treatments for various diseases ranging from cancer to neurodegenerative conditions including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Congratulations
Congratulations to Professor Richard Hartshorn who has been awarded the FACS award for Distinguished Contribution to Chemical Education. He made his presentation at an OPCW “Science for Diplomats” event at the OPCW 5th Review Conference on 16 May 2023.
Congratulations to Lily Hermanspahn on the successful defence of her PhD thesis entitled, “Synthesis of functionalised supramolecular assemblies” supervised by Paul Kruger. Well done Lily on such a polished performance, and good luck for the future!
