News & Events

Alana’s research in both the Partridge and Bren groups is about engineering cytochrome c proteins to understand how structural modifications affect their activities and functions. The poster is about her project in the Bren lab, where they are engineering cobalt cytochromes c to understand how the protein structure around the active site affects catalytic activity for hydrogen production. The cytochrome proteins she is focusing on are from two different organisms, horses and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. She was studying how the composition of one of the loops present in both structures affected catalytic activity.

Braden’s presentation was based on a recent article appearing in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in a multi-university collaboration with University of Rochester (Frank Huo, Todd D. Krauss), University of Wisconsin-Madison (Daniel J. Weix), and University of Texas at San Antonio (Zachary J. Tonzetich). In this work, they explored fundamental changes to a textbook chemical reaction, the electrophilic bromination of nitrobenzene — a thermally activated reaction, which notoriously only provides one type of product: meta-bromonitrobenzene. The ortho- and para- isomers are extremely difficult to produce under standard chemical conditions. Using strong light-matter interactions to form entangled light-matter states called polaritons, they theoretically predict the formation of these impossible products! The act of forming strongly coupled light-matter states enables the reorganization of the electron density of the molecular system and facilitates the reduction of the transition state barrier for the ortho- and/or para- isomers compared to that of the meta. Finally, they were able to calculate the electric field strengths necessary to mediate such modifications, and they found that the conditions are within the reach of state-of-the-art plasmonic cavity designs. Thus, they suggested to the experimental community to test our hypothesis that fundamental, textbook-level chemistry can be modified via strong light-matter coupling.

Congrats again for the awards and for the exciting research!