The Primarily Undergraduate Nanomaterials Cooperative: A New Model for Supporting Collaborative Research at Small Institutions on a National Scale

The Primarily Undergraduate Nanomaterials Cooperative (PUNC) is an organization for research-active faculty studying nanomaterials at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs), where undergraduate teaching and research go hand-in-hand. In this perspective, we outline the differences in maintaining an active research group at a PUI compared to an R1 institution. We also discuss the work of PUNC, which focuses on community building, instrument sharing, and facilitating new collaborations. Currently consisting of 37 members from across the United States, PUNC has created an online community consisting of its Web site (nanocooperative.org), a weekly online summer group meeting program for faculty and students, and a Discord server for informal conversations. Additionally, in-person symposia at ACS conferences and PUNC-specific conferences are planned for the future. It is our hope that in the years to come PUNC will be seen as a model organization for community building and research support at primarily undergraduate institutions

Why Functional Pre-Erythrocytic and Bloodstage Malaria Vaccines Fail: A Meta-Analysis of Fully Protective Immunizations and Novel Immunological Model

Background: Clinically protective malaria vaccines consistently fail to protect adults and children in endemic settings, and at best only partially protect infants. Methodology/Principal Findings: We identify and evaluate 1916 immunization studies between 1965-February 2010, and exclude partially or nonprotective results to find 177 completely protective immunization experiments. Detailed reexamination reveals an unexpectedly mundane basis for selective vaccine failure: live malaria parasites in the skin inhibit vaccine function. We next show published molecular and cellular data support a testable, novel model where parasite-host interactions in the skin induce malaria-specific regulatory T cells, and subvert early antigen-specific immunity to parasite-specific immunotolerance. This ensures infection and tolerance to reinfection. Exposure to Plasmodium-infected mosquito bites therefore systematically triggers immunosuppression of endemic vaccine-elicited responses. The extensive vaccine trial data solidly substantiate this model experimentally. Conclusions/Significance: We conclude skinstage-initiated immunosuppression, unassociated with bloodstage parasites, systematically blocks vaccine function in the field. Our model exposes novel molecular and procedural strategies to significantly and quickly increase protective efficacy in both pipeline and currently ineffective malaria vaccines, and forces fundamental reassessment of central precepts determining vaccine development. This has major implications fo

An Accurate and Universal Method for the Anharmonic Vibrational Analysis of the Raman Active C≡C Stretch of Terminal Alkynes

The terminal alkyne C≡C stretch has a large Raman scattering cross section in the “silent” region for biomolecules. This has led to many Raman tag and probe studies using molecules with this moiety. Computational investigation of these systems is vital to aid in the interpretation of the results. In this work, we develop a localized normal mode discrete variable representation (DVR) method for computing terminal alkyne vibrational frequencies and transition isotropic polarizabilities which can easily and accurately be applied to any terminal alkyne molecule. The errors of localization to the terminal alkyne moiety, anharmonic normal mode isolation, and discretization of the Born-Oppenheimer potential energy surface are quantified and found to oppose each other. This results in a method with low error compared to other anharmonic vibrational methods like VPT2 and experiment. Several density functionals are tested using the method, and TPSS-D3 is found to perform surprisingly well. Additionally, diffuse functions are found to be important for the accuracy of computed frequencies. Finally, the computation of vibrational properties like transition isotropic polarizabilities and the universality of the normal mode atomic displacements across molecules are demonstrated