How do you write and present research well?

Research is only half the work; the other half is writing and publishing. Your research is incomplete until you publish your data.^[1] Publishing is necessary but insufficient: others must cite your work.^[2] Writing well and preparing a coherent story will help your paper get past the first hurdle in the publishing process –the copy editor. The second hurdle is the editor, who checks if it is suitable for the journal, and reviews the abstract, conclusions, and references.^[3] The final hurdle is the reviewers, who devote more time to validate the hypotheses, results, and interpretation. Rejection rates across journals are increasing.^[4] Science copy editors send one out of five submissions to the editors, and their overall rejection rate is 93 %. The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering rejects close to 3 out of 4 papers researchers submit. Write better so journals accept your papers and researchers cite them.     

Sulfated zirconia and iron- and manganese-promoted sulfated zirconia: do they protonate alkanes?

Because of their high activities for alkane conversion, sulfated zirconia and iron- and manganese-promoted sulfated zirconia have been the objects of much recent attention as a possible next generation of solid acid catalysts for alkane conversion. These catalysts have been suggested to be superacidic on the basis of measurements with adsorbed Hammett indicator bases, but published data determined with other adsorbed bases indicate only moderately strong acid sites. The indicator methods are limited by the opaqueness of the materials and by the inability of the methods to probe a possible set of minority sites that might be responsible for the reactivity and catalytic activity for alkane conversions. Another approach to the challenge of estimating the acid strengths of the reactive and catalytic sites is to investigate the reactivities and catalytic activities of the materials for reactions which, for initiation, require donation of protons from a solid acid to a very weakly basic reactant such as an alkane. Such a test reaction is the acid-catalyzed dehydrogenation of alkanes proceeding by the Haag–Dessau mechanism (Olah type chemistry). This review includes a summary of results for conversion of ethane, propane, and n-butane that are consistent with the postulate that iron- and manganese-promoted sulfated zirconia and sulfated zirconia are capable of protonating light alkanes to give carbonium-ion transition states at temperatures as low as 200°C. The data support the postulate that these proton-donation reactions are important at low alkane conversions and in initiating alkane conversions, although conventional carbenium ion reactions predominate at high conversions. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

How do enzymes activate oxygen without inactivating themselves?

Detailed analyses of the oxidative half-reactions of glucose oxidase and soybean lipoxygenase provide insight into Nature's solution to the "trouble with oxygen". Coupled with studies of other O2-activating enzymes, two key features emerge. The first is the predominance of a rate-limiting transfer of the first electron transfer to O2, with subsequent electron and proton transfers occurring in rapid steps. The second feature is the identification of non-metal binding sites and channels for O2. These permit a controlled reactivity of oxygen to generate the desired regio- and stereochemical products, while minimizing deleterious side reactions.     

Traces do matter—Purity of 4-methyl-2-oxetanone and its effect on anionic ring-opening polymerization as evidenced by phosphazene superbase catalysis

Several methods for polymerizing 4-methyl-2-oxetanone (β-butyrolactone, BL) were developed allowing the controlled synthesis of polymers with molar masses up to 100 kDa. Although new catalytic systems have been described for the living anionic polymerization of BL, no detailed studies have been published on the influence of the monomer purity on the polymerization reaction. In the present study, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and mass spectrometry (MS) are used for assessing monomer purity. These techniques indicate that an additional reaction of BL with an oxidizing agent such as potassium permanganate produces a monomer of higher purity as demonstrated by the higher rate of BL polymerization and improved control over the polymerization process that is initiated with either tetrabutylammonium acetate or carboxylic acid/phosphazene base (P₁-t-Bu, P₂-t-Bu and P₄-t-Bu) systems.