Implementation of High School Level Laboratory Experiments Demonstrating Nanoscale Porosity in Metal–Organic Frameworks

Inorganic chemistry draws from many other disciplines of chemistry including organic, analytical, and physical chemistry, making it ideal for teaching foundational topics in high school and introductory undergraduate chemistry curricula. However, students rarely experience modern inorganic materials in introductory classes for a variety of reasons, including complexity of materials synthesis, expense of materials and instrumentation needed to analyze or demonstrate properties, and potential safety concerns. In this study, we use metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) as a modern class of materials that is both emblematic of the interdisciplinary nature of inorganic chemistry and capable of straightforward synthesis and application in introductory chemistry settings. We designed seven laboratory experiences for high school and new undergraduate students that include two MOF syntheses and five follow up gas and solution adsorption experiments. These experiments use low-toxicity reagents and solvents, can be carried out with minimal levels of expertise, and necessitate only common equipment such as laboratory balances and hot plates

Metal–Organic Frameworks for Fast Electrochemical Energy Storage: Mechanisms and Opportunities

Electrochemical energy storage devices are typically based on materials of inorganic nature which require high temperature synthesis and frequently feature scarce and/or toxic elements. Organic-based materials on the other hand can provide an attractive alternative, potentially yielding sustainable, safe, and cost-effective energy storage devices based on abundant elements (e.g. C, N, O, S, and H). However, attempts to incorporate organic and coordination compounds so far have led to sub-par cycling stability and charging rates due to insufficient structural and (electro)chemical stability, low electrical conductivity, and reduced performance at industrially relevant device scales. In recent years metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) have gained attention as having the potential to rival or even supersede traditional energy storage materials. Functional properties such as electronic or ionic conductivity can be incorporated into these materials by judicious design of their constituent inorganic and organic building blocks. However, full realization of the potential of MOFs for electrochemical energy storage requires joint expertise from distinct fields. In particular, bridges must be formed between electrochemists and synthetic and material chemists to establish the unified approach necessary to develop MOF-based energy storage devices exhibiting competitive performance

Meet-U: Educating through research immersion.

We present a new educational initiative called Meet-U that aims to train students for collaborative work in computational biology and to bridge the gap between education and research. Meet-U mimics the setup of collaborative research projects and takes advantage of the most popular tools for collaborative work and of cloud computing. Students are grouped in teams of 4-5 people and have to realize a project from A to Z that answers a challenging question in biology. Meet-U promotes "coopetition," as the students collaborate within and across the teams and are also in competition with each other to develop the best final product. Meet-U fosters interactions between different actors of education and research through the organization of a meeting day, open to everyone, where the students present their work to a jury of researchers and jury members give research seminars. This very unique combination of education and research is strongly motivating for the students and provides a formidable opportunity for a scientific community to unite and increase its visibility. We report on our experience with Meet-U in two French universities with master's students in bioinformatics and modeling, with protein-protein docking as the subject of the course. Meet-U is easy to implement and can be straightforwardly transferred to other fields and/or universities. All the information and data are available at www.meet-u.org

Examples of strategies and results for the 2016–2017 edition.

<p>Left panel: Team B implemented an efficient sampling algorithm using a grid representation of the proteins to be docked and FFT. For the scoring, they used evolutionary information extracted from multiple sequence alignments of homologs of the two partners. Right panel: Team D used biological knowledge during the sampling step to filter out conformations early and drastically reduce the search space. The results obtained by the students (Teams B and D) on two complexes (barnase–barstar complex, Protein Data Bank [PDB] code: 1AY7, and an antibody–antigen complex, PDB code: 1JPS, respectively) are comparable to those obtained from state-of-the-art methods, namely ZDOCK [<a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005992#pcbi.1005992.ref010" target="_blank">10</a>] and ATTRACT [<a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005992#pcbi.1005992.ref011" target="_blank">11</a>]. ZDOCK relies on efficient sampling using FFT and on an optimized energy function [<a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005992#pcbi.1005992.ref010" target="_blank">10</a>]. ATTRACT proceeds through minimization steps using an empirical, coarse-grained molecular mechanics potential [<a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005992#pcbi.1005992.ref011" target="_blank">11</a>]. Candidate conformations for the complexes are represented as cartoons and superimposed onto the known crystallographic structures. The receptor is in black, the ligand from the candidate conformation is colored (in orange for Meet-U students, blue for ZDOCK, and purple for ATTRACT), and that from the crystallographic structure is in grey. With each candidate conformation are associated its rank, according to the scoring function of the method, and its deviation (in Å) from the crystallographic structure. FFT, Fast Fourier Transform; PDB, protein data bank.</p