First, a very brief history of scholarly publishing, starting in 1665[1] when scientific journals started to be published by learned societies. This model continued until the 1950s, when commercial publishers such as Pergamon Press started with their USP (unique selling point) of rapid time to publication of ~3 months,[2] compared to typical times for many learned society publishers of 2 years or longer.
Zosurabalbin[1],[2], is receiving a great deal of attention as a new class of antibiotic which can target infections for which current treatment options are inadequate.
I will approach this example of a molecule-of-the-year candidate – in fact the eventual winner in the reader poll – from the point of view of data. Its a metallocene arranged in the form of a ring comprising 18 sub-units.[1] Big enough to deserve a 3D model rather than the static images you almost invariably get in journals (and C&EN). So how does one go to the journal and acquire the coordinates for such a model?
The Science education unit at the ACS publication C&EN publishes its list of molecules of the year (as selected by the editors and voted upon by the readers) in December. Here are some observations about three of this year’s batch. Diberyllocene[1] with its unusual Be-Be bond has already beeen covered on this blog.[2], where I commented that lithioborocene should be possible to make as well.
Around 1996, journals started publishing what became known as “ESI” or electronic supporting information, alongside the articles themselves, as a mechanism for exposing the data associated with the research being reported and exploiting some of the new opportunities offered by the World Wide Web. From the outset, such ESI was expressed as a paginated Acrobat file, with the Web being merely a convenient document delivery mechanism.
In 2023, we very much take for granted that everyone and pretty much everything is online. But it was not always so and when I came across an old plan indicating how the chemistry department at Imperial College was connected in 1989, I was struck by how much has happened in the 34 years since. Nowadays all the infrastructures needed are effectively “built in” to the building when it is constructed and few are even aware of them.
Sometimes, the properties of a molecule are predicted long before it is synthesised. One such is diberyllocene. I first encountered a related molecule, beryllocene itself, many moons ago.[1] This was unusual because unlike the original metallocenes, the metal atom was not symmetrically disposed between the two cyclopentadienyl faces.
Scientific data in chemistry has come a long way in the last few decades. Originally entangled into scientific articles in the form of tables of numbers or diagrams, it was (partially) disentangled into supporting information when journals became electronic in the late 1990s.[1] The next phase was the introduction of data repositories in the early naughties.
The previous examples of four atom systems displaying two layers of aromaticity illustrated how 4 (B 4 ), 8 (C 4 ) and 12 (N 4 ) valence electrons were partitioned into 4n+2 manifolds (respectively 2+2, 6+2 and 6+6). The triplet state molecule B 2 C 2 with 6 electrons partitioned into 2π and 4σ electrons, with the latter following Baird’s aromaticity rule.[1],[2]. Now for the final missing entry;
The topic of dicarbon, C 2 , has been discussed here for a few years now. It undoubtedly would be a gas!