Chemistry on the Couch

Written by  Dr Claire Weekley, MRACI

Published 10 August 2020

In the course of a few weeks in early 2020, plans for Chemistry in the Pub necessarily morphed into Chemistry on the Couch, which ultimately took place in living rooms across Melbourne on July 14. The purpose of the event was to highlight the work of Victorian early-mid career chemists and provide an opportunity to share and hear about great chemistry in an informal setting without being confined to a single chemistry discipline.

All four speakers demonstrated how chemistry and chemical techniques are used to solve problems and innovate across scientific fields. 

Dr Karyn Jarvis, a research engineer at the Australian National Fabrication Facility detailed a stunning array of instruments and techniques that are available to manipulate and characterise surfaces for physical and biological applications. Whether its depositing layers of single atom thickness, assessing the integrity of a surface under different conditions or optimising a surface for a particular application, she knows a technique that you could use.

Dr Rajesh Ramanathan (RMIT University) takes inspiration from the human olfactory system in the design of ‘nanozyme’ sensors for the detection of different strains of Golden Staph. He coats gold nanoparticles, with their unique and tunable chemical properties, with a mix of DNA aptamers that target different strains of the bacteria. The unique spectral patterns produced by the mix of nanozymes and bacteria can be used to rapidly identify the strain causing bacterial infection.

Mr Shiying Zhu (University of Melbourne) is developing a 2D NMR method that can determine the structure of an antimicrobial peptide inside the membrane of the bacteria that it targets. From designing the spin probes to enhance the NMR signal from inside the bacterial membrane to expressing and purifying the isotope-labelled peptide and conducting the NMR experiments, Mr Zhu is working across chemistry and biochemistry to address a structural biology problem.

Finally, Associate Professor Dominic Hare, also from the University of Melbourne, asked us to consider human cells on a fundamental level as mixtures of the chemical elements. The mix of elements will vary according to cell type, cell stage and – critically ¬– health status. Using laser ablation ICP-MS, Dr Hare and his group have collected elemental maps of tissue samples, compared them to histopathological analyses of the same samples and identified the elemental signatures of the cancerous regions. With a combination of analytical chemistry, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Dr Hare aims to improve cancer diagnoses from tissue samples.

As you can see, the audience enjoyed an evening rich with exciting chemistry and chemical applications that helped alleviate the gloom of a winter’s evening in lockdown.

A big thank you to all the speakers who took the time to share their work with us, to the early-mid career members of the Victorian Branch Committee who supported and assisted with this event and staff of the RACI National Office who provided essential administrative support.

If you would like to be a speaker or an audience member at a similar early-mid career chemist event in the future, get in touch!