Latest Catalysis Stories

For the past 100 years, the Haber-Bosch process has been used to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, which is essential in the manufacture of fertilizer. Despite the longstanding reliability of the process, scientists have had little understanding of how it actually works. But now a team of chemists, led by Patrick Holland of the University of Rochester, has new insight into how the ammonia is formed. Their findings are published in the latest issue of Science. Holland calls...

A tree outside Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher Pratul Agarwal's office window provided the inspiration for a discovery that may ultimately lead to drugs with fewer side effects, less expensive biofuels and more. Just as a breeze causes leaves, branches and ultimately the tree to move, enzymes moving at the molecular level perform hundreds of chemical processes that have a ripple effect necessary for life. Previously, protein complexes were viewed as static entities with biological...

Just as a breeze causes leaves, branches and ultimately the tree to move, enzymes moving at the molecular level perform hundreds of chemical processes that have a ripple effect necessary for life. Protein complexes are often viewed as static entities with their biological functions understood in terms of direct interactions, but that isn't the case, as emphasized in a paper published November 8 in the online, open-access journal PLoS Biology. The work shows that the amount of flexibility in a...

Working with lab cultures and mice, Johns Hopkins scientists have found that a strain of the common gut pathogen Bacteroides fragilis causes colon inflammation and increases activity of a gene called spermine oxidase (SMO) in the intestine. The effect is to expose the gut to hydrogen peroxide – the caustic, germ-fighting substance found in many medicine cabinets -- and cause DNA damage, contributing to the formation of colon tumors, say the scientists. "Our data suggest that the SMO gene...

International team led by Boston College researchers uses new catalyst to synthesize two potent anti-cancer molecules Research carried out at Boston College, in collaboration with scientists at MIT and the University of Oxford, has led to the development of an efficient and highly selective catalyst for ring-closing olefin metathesis, one of the most widely used reactions in chemical synthesis, the team reports in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The team used the new catalyst,...

Just as people who have the enthusiasm and energy to make things happen are called catalysts, their namesakes — chemical catalysts — also are facilitators, jump-starting chemical reactions that would never work or would work too slowly. Almost everything we rely upon in everyday life — 90 percent of all commercially produced products (a trillion dollars worth each year) — involve catalysts at some stage of their manufacture. A new episode in the 2011 edition of a popular video...

AMSTERDAM, Nov. 2, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Albemarle Corporation (NYSE: ALB) was named "Biodiesel Corporation of the Year" by the World Refining Association during the Biofuels 2011 Annual Meeting in Amsterdam on October 12. This prestigious award, which was presented to representatives from Albemarle's Alternative Fuel Technologies (AFT) division, recognizes industry leaders that have made substantial contributions in the field of renewable fuels. (Logo:...

Hydrogen offers great promise as a renewable energy source. It's staggeringly plentiful (the most abundant element in the Universe) and environmentally friendly (used in a fuel cell, it gives off only water). Unfortunately, storing and transporting hydrogen for personal use is a significant engineering challenge. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas and Washington State University in Pullman, Wash., has made the counterintuitive discovery that aluminum, with a...

Journal of Biological Chemistry: Oxygen inactivates the enzyme function in three phases Scientists from the Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology at the RUB have published a report in the Journal of Biological Chemistry explaining why enzymes used for the production of hydrogen are so sensitive to oxygen. In collaboration with researchers from Berlin, they used spectroscopic methods to investigate the time course of the processes that lead to the inactivation of the enzyme's iron center....

NORTH CANTON, Ohio, Oct. 5, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Biotech Medical, Inc. introduced their enzyme cleaning product line just a couple short months ago; now they are very excited to announce these planet-safe cleaning products are available for sale on their website, with no minimum order quantity requirement. SpectraSan(TM) Enzymes are all-natural and proven effective at accomplishing the specific job targeted. They are environmentally friendly and, in certain cases, actually help the task of...