Hai Truong is Dec09 Submeta ONS Award Winner

Hai Truong, working under the supervision of Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University, is the December 2009 Submeta Open Notebook Science Challenge Award winner. He wins a cash prize from Submeta.

Hai mainly collaborated with Khalid Mirza to try to understand co-solute effects for Ugi products in benzene. See his experiments here:
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/list+of+experiments

This was the final Submeta ONS Award for 2008-9. We would like to thank all the sponsors - Submeta, Nature Publishing Group and Sigma-Aldrich - for making this project a reality. A summary of the results from the past year will be published shortly.

For more information see:
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/submetaawards08

ONS Solubility Challenge on Sigma-Aldrich tech sheet

The Open Notebook Science Solubility Challenge has made it onto the Solubility Information for Products technical sheet of Sigma-Aldrich:

Sigma-Aldrich are currently collaborating with Nature and Submeta in an Open Notebook Science Challenge. This is a project aimed at facilitating the generation of solubility information for chemicals. Please follow this link 'Open Notebook Science Challenge - Solubility' for more information on this project.

This is a great example of how synergies between academia, industry, publishers and foundations can take place quickly and in the open.

There is some other interesting information on that page - notably a table translating written descriptions of solubility terminology - like "freely soluble" - into numbers.

Sigma-Aldrich ships ONS solubility challenge batch

A while back I reported that Sigma-Aldrich was sponsoring the Open Notebook Science challenge by donating compounds when necessary. That was a very generous offer and we have just made use of it. The first batch has shipped yesterday to Jenny Hale at Southampton University. Since she is using a SpeedVac to measure solubility, we made a list of lower cost Ugi product reactants with higher boiling points. Here is the collection:

Every solubility measurement technique has its pros and cons. Evaporation based methods are very direct but are limited to high boiling solutes. UV is sensitive to low concentrations but requires a calibration curve and a chromophore. (for example EXP024)

NMR is less sensitive than UV but has the advantage that it can handle solutes of any volatility and does not require a chromophore - and from an efficiency standpoint - it does not require a calibration curve. At our concentration range of interest (>0.1M), NMR does seem to be the most convenient method in my lab: make a saturated solution in the solvent of interest then dilute with a deuterated solvent (generally CDCl3) then add an internal standard (acetonitrile is handy) then take one spectrum and analyse. For an example see Khalid's EXP030.

For an sampling of all the methods see our experiment list.

Sigma-Aldrich First Official Sponsor of Open Notebook Science Challenge

Thanks to speedy action from Sandy Adam and William Sommer at Sigma-Aldrich we have our first official sponsor for the Open Notebook Science Challenge!

They are willing to donate compounds (aldehydes, carboxylic acids and amines) to schools in most parts of the world for them to do solubility measurements under ONS conditions.

Contact me if interested in more details.