• Question: what is your favorite element and why do you like it

    Asked by 377mecm24 to Neil, Leonie on 5 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by Catriona.
    • Photo: Neil Keddie

      Neil Keddie answered on 5 Mar 2018:

      Fluorine.

      I’m definitely in #TeamFluorine. I’ve been working in a group involved in organofluroine (that’s molecules that have fluorine bonded to carbon) research for the past 8 years and I’m still amazed about all the clever things that it can do.

      A fluorine atom is just slightly bigger than a hydrogen atom, but when you swap H for F, you can make a big difference in a molecule’s shape and how it interacts with its environment. This means you can tune drug or agrochemical molecules to work more effectively against their targets, or you can make better liquid crystals, so the screens in your phone / tablet / tv / watch / computer (even the screen you’re reading this on now probably has liquid crystal in it that contain fluorine) are more responsive.

      Radioactive fluorine can also be used to make a sugar molecule called FDG (2-fluorodeoxyglucose), which is used in cancer diagnosis to show ‘hot-spots’ where the cancer grows quicker than the cells around it.

      You may have also heard of fluoride (that’s the inorganic salt form of fluorine) that’s in our toothpaste (and sometimes added to drinking water too), which helps to keep our teeth strong and in good condition.

    • Photo: Leonie Bole

      Leonie Bole answered on 6 Mar 2018:

      My favourite element is also a non-metal – boron! Boron chemistry is fascinating and very versatile. Most of the first year of my PhD has looked at taking a small boron reagent and adding it across aldehydes, ketones, nitriles, pyridine…a whole range of compounds. The great thing about boron is that it can be easily analysed by a technique called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (NMR for short) and depending on where we see a peak, tells us what kind of boron compound we have got!
      Boron compounds are vital to the synthesis of many drug molecules and in industrial scale processes. A lot of the materials we use every day would not be possible without it!

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