Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS’s) are widely used to coat paper and cardboard for food packaging because of their desirable grease, water, and heat resistant properties.

The first half of the talk focuses on aminoglycoside antibiotics, highly active protein synthesis inhibitors that impact a wide range of both Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria. Though these drugs have many benefits and currently find use in the clinic, they can bring about reversible nephrotoxicity and irreversible ototoxicity.

Over the years, a common obstacle put in front of chemists has been the ability to construct molecules with medium sized ring structure in a high yielding and selective fashion. These higher order cyclic systems have a variety of problems synthetically with low levels of regioselective, chemoselectivity, stereoselectivity, and high levels of strain inside the scaffolds. There are very few examples of larger than six-membered rings easily synthesized using classic cycloaddition methods such as Diels-Alder and variants thereof.

Sulfur-fluoride exchange (SuFEx) reaction was first demonstrated by Sharpless and his co-workers¹ in 2014. SuFEx is now considered as the second generation of click chemistry. It was established on the silicon centers, which can activate the exchange of S-F bonds for S-O bonds. A strong base, like triazabicyclodecene (TBD), was usually considered as the catalyst of SuFEx. Since then, we started to explore the possibility of the reaction between other heteroatom fluorides and silyl ethers. We found boron-fluoride (B-F) bonds are reactive as well.

In 1963 solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) was introduced by Merrifield. Since then, the chemical synthesis of short peptides became routine. However, synthesis of long peptides remains difficult, being time demanding and offering lower yields as the size of the desired chain increases. Likewise, the synthesis of small proteins was not possible until the development of Native Chemical Ligation (NCL), a technique for ligation of peptides to produce longer polypeptides/proteins.

Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is an in vitro enzymatic method used to amplify specific DNA sequences. The simple concept of PCR relies upon the repeated synthesis of targeted DNA using DNA polymerase enzyme. Conceived by Kary Mullis in 1983, PCR has now become a common and often indispensable technique that is used in clinical laboratory and medical laboratory research for a broad variety of applications including biomedical research and criminal forensics.

Collective behavior is seen in a variety of biological organizations, varying from the collective attack of viruses on bacterial cells to troops of baboons. This may lead to the synchronized oscillations that includes either fire flies or cells being able to synchronize their time clocks. This can be observed with humans as well, where individual cells synchronize into circadian rhythms.

Phytoplankton constitute the base the of the aquatic food web and are a primary driver of biogeochemical processes in the ocean. The concentration of chlorophyll-α ([Chl-α]) were being used as a proxy to quantify phytoplankton activity in ocean. Its concentration in ocean can be obtained through analysis spectral bands variance in remote sensing reflectance measurement(e.g.