Professor Jay Siegel Published his Latest Research Article in Nature Chemistry

On January 26, 2014, Professor Jay Siegel, Dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, published an online article in Nature Chemistry titled "Induced-fit catalysis of corannulene bowl-to-bowl inversion" as a corresponding author, in collaboration with his partners from Northwestern University, U.S. This article illustrates the principles of enzyme catalysis (first proposed by Pauling and Jencks) through a well-defined model system that has been fully characterized crystallographically, computationally and kinetically. Catalysis of the bowl-to-bowl inversion processes that pertain to corannulene is achieved by combining ground-state destabilization and transition-state stabilization within the cavity of an extended tetracationic cyclophane. This synthetic receptor fulfils a role reminiscent of a catalytic antibody by stabilizing the planar transition state for the bowl-to-bowl inversion of (ethyl) corannulene (which accelerates this process by a factor of ten at room temperature) by an induced-fit mechanism first formulated by Koshland.