The 586^th meeting of the Sydney University Chemical Society will be held on Wednesday 13^th November in Le Fèvre Lecture Theatre 2 of the Chemistry Building on the campus of the University of Sydney. The speakers will be Greg Halder, Stuart Prescott and Jennifer Turner, winners of the Le Fèvre Student Lecture Awards for 2002.

The incorporation of both nanoporosity and spin state switching into molecular framework materials has implications for the generation of new advanced materials with applications in areas such as molecular sensing. Here we report a new porous material with switching functionality that can be turned on or off, or even altered, as a function of its guest-exchange properties.

 White Water RAFTing: Controlled Polymerisation in Emulsions

Emulsion polymerisation is used to make products including paints and adhesives. A recent advance in free-radical polymerisation, Reversible Addition-Fragmentation chain Transfer (RAFT), has the potential to make a new generation of products, but previous attempts to use RAFT in emulsion polymerisation had failed. This talk discusses how developing a good mechanistic understanding of the systems was used to solve these problems. This work has provided a suitable footing for the development of new products.

Much recent scientific and media attention has focussed on the emerging resistance of bacteria to even our most powerful ‘antibiotics-of-last-resort’, such as vancomycin. The rapidly increasing reports of resistant strains, such as vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), highlight the need for the development of new antibacterial agents. Herein we report our design, synthesis and evaluation of a number of inhibitors of dihydrodipicolinate synthase, which may provide a new class of antibacterial agents.