In the afternoon of April 4th, 2015, Professor Sir Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester gave a lecture of “Materials in the Flatland” in the conference room of the Basic Energy Sciences Building of DICP .Prof. Novoselov is the co-inventor of the two-dimensional (2D) graphene material, for which he was awarded 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. His lecture attracted more than 300 scientific staffs and students from DICP and Dalian University of Technology.As part of the Lecture Series of the Basic Energy Sciences Forum, Prof. Novoselov presented a systematic introduction of the work from his research group on fundamental research of graphene materials, as well as their applications. In his presentation he also shared his perspective on the future applications of graphene and other 2Dcrystalline materials. Prof. Xinhe Bao chaired the lecture forum and the deputy director of DICP, Prof. Xueming Yang, delivered a welcome speech on behalf of DICP.
　　As an adjunct professor of the “Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials (iChem2011)”, Prof. Novoselov has built a strong collaborative relationship with scientists from DICP. The center of iChem2011 is established jointly by Xiamen University, DICP, Fudan University and the University of Science and Technology in China. During his visit to DICP, Prof. Novoselov extended his wishes to further and strengthen the bilateral collaboration, and to promote together the application of graphene and other 2D materials in the fields of chemistry and energy. Prior to his lecture, Prof. Novoselov visited the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis, the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Reaction Dynamics and Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy in the morning of April 4 th, 2015.He had in-depth discussion and exchanges with related researchers and students in several research fields, such as surface chemistry, photo catalysis, catalytic materials and molecular reaction dynamics. He also received an interview from Dr. M Donna, the guest commentator of the DICP homepage, and complimented DICP as a world-class research institute with top-tier research teams, academic environment and research facilities.
　　 
　　 
　　 
　　Professor Konstantin Novoselov was born in Russia in August1974. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and undertook his PhD studies at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands before moving to the University of Manchester with his doctoral advisor Andre Geim in 2001. Professor Novoselov is best known for isolating graphene at the University of Manchester in2004, and is an expert in condensed matter physics, mesoscopic physics and nanotechnology. His achievements in the field of graphene won him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics and thus he became a youngest winner of the prize since 1973. He hold spositions of Honorary Professor of Physics at the University of Manchester and Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). He was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours.（Xiumei Jiang/Lanhui Ren） 

　　The group of Prof. Huamin Zhang from Energy Storage Division (DNL 17) recently made new progress in non-fluorinated ion conducting membranes for flow battery (DNL 17). They have dramatically improved the stability and selectivity of non-fluorinated ion conducting membranes via constructing internal cross-linking network. The work will provide a novel method for exploring high-performance ion conducting membrane. The related results had been published online by Advanced Functional Materials (http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201500284). The results had received high evaluation from reviewer and have been judged as “very important and very urgent” paper by editor.
　　In the last few years, Energy Storage Division at DICP has made significantly progress in the non-fluorinated ion conducting membranes. They first proposed the “ion sieving conductive mechanism” and introduced porous ion conducting membranes in the application flow battery. In addition, the structure-function relationship and ion transport mechanism for non—fluorinated ion conductive membrane has been investigated in detail. (Energy Environ. Sci. 2013, 6, 776; 2012,5, 6299; 2011,4, 1147; 2011 4,1676; ChemsusChem 6 (2013) 328; J. Mater. Chem. A, 2014,2,9524;Chem. Commun 2014,50, 4596; Sci. Rep.4, 4016; DOI:10.1038/srep04016…). This result is a further progress based on their previous work.
　　This work is financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, Outstanding Young Scientist Foundation CAS and Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials. （Li Xianfeng）

　　Protein methylation catalyzed by S-adenosyl methionine (SAM)-dependent methyltransferase represents a major posttranslational modification of important biological significance. Because methylation can occur on nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur centres and multiple methylation states exist on the nitrogen centres, methylproteome remains poorly documented. Known methods based on antibody enrichment identified only a part of N-methylation. To address several fundamental questions in protein methylation, Professor Zongbao K. Zhao and Hanfa Zou at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, CAS, engineered SAM-auxotrophic Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain, designed the methylation by isotope labelled SAM strategy, and reached a highly-confident yeast methylproteome. Researchers identified 43 methylated proteins, containing 68 methylation events associated with 64 methylation sites. More than 90% of these methylation events were previously unannotated in the Uniprot database. The results indicate, 1) over 2.6% of yeast proteins are methylated, 2) the amino acid residue preference of protein methylation follows the order Lys >> Arg > Asp > Glu ≈ Asp ≈ Gln ≈ His > Cys, 3) N-methylation is largely exclusive in terms of methylation state. The dataset is the most comprehensive methylproteome known-to-date for S. cerevisiae, and should significantly contribute to the field of protein methylation and related research. The study has been published recently at Journal of Proteomics (2015, 114, 226).
　　

　　Recently, the DNL0302 team led by Prof. Mojie Cheng, in collaboration with Assistant Professor Xiaobo Chen of University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), made new progress in solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC). The work was just published in the recent issue of Nano Letters (Nano Lett., 2015, 15(3):1703-1709).
　　Solid oxide fuel cell is an energy conversion device that produces electricity by clean, efficient and environmental-friendly means. In the past decades, many efforts have been devoted to developing intermediate-temperature solid oxide fuel cells (IT-SOFCs). However, high-performance and reliable IT-SOFCs still remain a big challenge, mainly due to the sluggish oxygen-reduction-reaction (ORR) activity on cathode or poor cathode stability.
　　In this work, we develop a nanoparticles-loaded SOFC cathode that enhances fuel cell output (200 ? 300% power improvement), and enables superior stability from 600 to 800 °C. The high performance is likely due to the higher TPB densities from the improved LSM-YSZ particle-to-particle contact and the intimate contact between the co-loaded LSM-YSZ nanoparticles and the YSZ framework. The improved stability is likely due to the high-temperature stability of the loaded LSM nanoparticles where the co-loaded YSZ nanoparticles successfully suppress the particle growth of the LSM nanoparticles. This study provides a promising approach for obtaining stable and high-performance cathode at various operation temperatures for IT-SOFCs.
　　This work is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.
　　(By ZHAO Zhe / ZHANG Xiaomin)

　　Profs. Can Li, Yan Liu and coworkers from the State Key Laboratory of Catalysis at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics recently made new progress in heterogeneous asymmetric catalysis. They developed the first example about bifunctional chiral base catalyzed addition of thiols to in situ generated aryl- and alkyl- substituted ortho-Quinone methides (o-QMs) in excellent reactivities and enantioselectivities. The study provides a new synthetic method toward bioactive interesting ??aryl- and ?-alkyl-substituted benzyl mercaptans. Recently, the research paper has been published online in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., doi: 10.1002/anie.201409894, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.201409894.
　　Heterogeneous asymmetric catalysis is one of the efficient methods for the preparation of chiral compounds. Due to its combination of basic science research and potential industrial applications, heterogeneous chiral catalysts or reaction systems with high reactivities and selectivities are extremely demand. Prof. Can Li’s group has been devoting to the development of new heterogeneous catalytic systems. In this area, they reported the first example about grafting Sharpless catalyst onto the surface of silica and in the mesopores of MCM-41(Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2002, 821).In addition, during of studying chiral catalysis in nanopores, the same group observed the molecular [Co(salen)] catalyst confined in SBA-16 show a significantly enhanced cooperative activation effect in the hydrolytic kinetic resolution of epoxides (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2007, 6861) and the enhancement of the performance confined within carbon nanotubes (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2011, 4913). Furthermore, the group also conducted asymmetric catalysis reactions in liquid-liquid biphasic systems and posed the concept of “enmulsion catalysis” in academia (Chem. Eur. J., 2004, 2277). Recently, a series of Aldol reactions have been published by utilizing the concept of “emulsion catalysis” (J. Catal., 2007, 360; Green Chem., 2011, 1983; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2012, 13159).
　　Ortho-Quinone methides (o-QMs) are important intermediates in a number of biological processes, and have been identified as active species in many chemical reactions. Despite their broad synthetic utility, only very few catalytic systems have been reported to date on the enantioselective addition to o-QMs. However, no catalytic system based on a chiral organic base has been reported for the reaction involving o-QMs. This may be attributed to the fact that reactive o-QMs are often generated in situ from various precursors with the assistance of either acid or base, which is not compatible with catalysts based on organic bases or may provide racemic products as a result of a significant background reaction. This work further exploits the advantage of water-oil biphase in asymmetric catalysis. A water-oil biphasic reaction system was developed to realize the spatial separation between a) the organic-base catalyst and reactants in the organic phase, and b) the inorganic base in the aqueous phase, and thus to suppress the racemic background reaction. Based on this method, an acid-base bifunctional organic catalyst achieved excellent chiral induction and extended substrate scope in the asymmetric reaction of the o-QMs. This study paves a new route for the reactions involving o-QMs and water-oil biphasic system.
　　This work is financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Basic Research Program of China (973 project) and the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars. (by Yan Liu and Wengang Guo)

　　A critical review on catalytic synthesis of amines from alcohols and amines through borrowing hydrogen strategy was recently published in Chemical Society Reviews by Prof. Zhengkun Yu, et al. from the Laboratories of Organometallic Catalysis and Synthesis, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
　　http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2015/cs/c4cs00496e?page=search
　　Transition metal-catalyzed N-alkylation of amines and related compounds with alcohols avoids the use of alkylating agents by means of borrowing hydrogen (BH) activation of the alcohol substrates. Water is produced as the only by-product, which makes the “BH” processes atom-economic and environmentally benign. Diverse types of homogeneous organometallic and heterogeneous transition metal catalysts, and substrates such as N-nucleophiles including amines, amides, sulfonamides and ammonia, and various alcohols, can be used for this purpose, demonstrating the promising potential of “BH” processes to replace the procedures using traditional alkylating agents in pharmaceutical and chemical industries. This critical review summarizes the recent advances in “BH” N-alkylation of amines with alcohols since 2009. “Semi-BH” N-alkylation processes with or without an external hydrogen acceptor is also briefly presented. Suitable discussion of the “BH” strategy provides new principles for establishing green processes to replace the relevant traditional synthetic methods for C-N bond formation. The recent achievements in this area from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics was also highlighted. (Lab 203/Ping Wu)