Final WATSURF 2013 Day and interesting papers

The last day of WATSURF 2013 had one highlight for me, which was a comment by Volker Kempter (TU Clausthal, Germany) that ionic liquids (ILs) could serve as model systems for understanding phenomena in biology.  He emphasised that:

* There's lots of segregation phenomena, pattern formation, etc.
* Ionic liquids also have interesting behaviour under confinement and are easier to study than systems in water, because you can work at ultra-high vacuum (ILs have very low vapour pressure).
* Can deposit monolayers and can do surface-sensitive characterization.
* Can study IL-water mixtures (many of the chemical groups at the interface are similar with biology).
* Theory on IL's is tractable: systems are simple enough to model at the quantum level, and can check force fields at all times, so there's fewer force field issues.  There's also lots of other kinds of interactions that may play a role that may be underappreciated in biology (e.g., pi-pi interactions, metal ion coordination).

I asked him about basic outstanding issues with ILs in general, and he mentioned that the interaction of ILs with surfaces is underexplored (relevance for electrochemistry, lubrication).  If I ever want to get into this field, he suggested I look into the references mentioned in the introduction of this paper.

On a similar note of other interesting fields, Thomas Loerting and Werner Kuhs suggested three different places to look at to learn more about atmospheric chemistry and ice.


Finally, a couple of interesting papers that came out over the weekend:

* Rubinovich and Polak, "The Intrinsic Role of Nanoconfinement in Chemical Equilibrium: Evidence from DNA Hybridization", Nano Letters (Just Accepted) (2013): When small numbers of reactants A and B in a small volume can react to form AB dimers, the observed relation between the number of monomers and dimers differs from the thermodynamic limit result (this is fairly obvious, but somehow they manage to give this effect a fancy name: Nanoconfinement Effect on Chemical Equilibrium, or NCECE).  They work out the deviations expected from simple stat mech with low numbers of particles and compare to single-molecule experiments of hybridising ssDNA strands to confirm their theoretical predictions.

* Choi et al, "Mechanism for the endocytosis of spherical nucleic acid nanoparticle conjugates", PNAS Early Edition (2013): Chad Mirkin's group works out the mechanism for cells to swallow DNA-coated nanoparticles (it's quite active, apparently), and suggests that these particles can be used as vectors to deliver payloads (e.g. drugs) into cells.