There are all sorts of different research areas in chemistry. Consider my path, for example. When I was just a young undergrad trying to find my calling, I loved tackling mechanisms for organic reactions, but I also loved the “breaking all the rules” in inorganic chemistry. In trying to decide which route I wanted to take, Prof. Stephen Westcott introduced me to the best of both worlds: organo-metallic chemistry. You get all sorts of crazy colours and many of the molecules disobey the conventional rules! You need to be careful though, because many of them will react instantly with water and oxygen. And I mean instantly! For example, although an incredibly simple organometallic molecule, tert-butyllithium (t-BuLi) is incredibly dangerous since it catches fire at the slightest hint of air.

Who doesn’t want to start the day with a warm cup of coffee? Coffee has a stimulating effect on humans because of its caffeine content and for that reason it has become one of the most popular drinks in the world. Some clinical studies actually suggest that small amounts of caffeine everyday might be beneficial for adults. In this blog I am going to highlight an experiment done in collaboration with the Swager group at MIT using an organometallic complex to quantify the caffeine content in regular coffee without sample preparation!

BODIPY dyes, which are boron difluoride compounds supported by dipyrrinato ligands, have gained recognition as being one of the more versatile fluorophores due to their superior photophysical properties.[1,2] BODIPY derivatives are used as stable functional dyes in several fields such as light harvesters, laser dyes, fluorescent switches, and biomolecular labels.[3-6] They gained popularity as biological probes due to the easy modification of the ligand framework, extension of the chromophore, and substitution of the fluorine atoms.6 Figure 1 shows some commercially available BODIPY dyes used as biological probes.