Core Activities:
The ACD Communication Team
The Team consists
of Kermit Murray, Jaya Arunachalam, Kazuko Matsumoto, Ryszard Lobinski,
Zhifang Chai and Kip Powell (coordinator). They have grouped their
proposed activities under 'continuing' and 'new initiatives'.
Continuing
activity will include: Presenting ACD activities in CI;
Producing 'Teamwork'; Review of project proposals in terms
of maximizing dissemination; Use of 6-monthly Project Reports to
identify new opportunities for dissemination, conference presentations
etc.
New Initiatives
will include:
(a) Promoting the needs of developing nations. We plan a series
of articles for CI to highlight needs of developing countries
and initiatives that respond to these.
(b) Improved
use of the web. Use the web to (a) link ACD with details of sponsored
conferences, workshops etc.; (b) disseminate information coming
out of these; (c) improve communication with/from user groups. The
use of on-line document mark-up for feedback on IUPAC draft Recommendations
is being evaluated.
(c) Improve
ACD links with national chemical societies. This includes drafting
a generic document on ACD and IUPAC that can be adapted for use
in regional chemical society publications.
(d) Improve
communication with editors of key journals for publicity of Recommendations,
vector articles, and to promote use of IUPAC Terminology.
(f) Publicity
material for Congress, GA and IUPAC-sponsored conferences. This
includes the ACD mini-symposium for the next GA; ACD project posters
for the GA; revision of the power-point presentation to highlight
ACD activities.
Emerging
issues in developing countries
Jan-Åke
Jonsson coordinates the Team which will focus on collecting ideas
for activities to promote analytical chemistry and assist analytical
chemists in developing countries.
One important
partner is SEANAC (Southern and Eastern African Network on Analytical
Chemist) (www.seanac.org),
an Associated Organisation of IUPAC. From SEANAC (via Dr Nelson
Torto) a number of suggestions have been received: support of lectureships,
compilation of a data base on expertise, a workshop, etc.
The team will
coordinate and contribute to articles for Chemistry International
on "Emerging needs in developing countries" and has some
provisional topics that could be developed for such articles.
One of the missions of the team is to follow the progress of the
joint IUPAC-IOCD project "Standardization of Analytical Approaches
and Analytical Capacity - Building in Africa" in which several
of the task group members are involved. [See below.]
Any help is
more than welcome. People interested in this area are asked to contact
Jan-Åke directly at <[email protected]>.
Emerging
issues in analytical chemistry: metallomics
Metal ions
at the trace and ultratrace levels are widely utilized by biological
systems in fundamental processes such as signalling, gene expression,
and catalysis. Therefore, the chemistry of a cell needs to be characterized
not only by its characteristic genome in the nucleus and a protein
content, a proteome, but also by the distribution of the metals
and metalloids among the different species and cell compartments.
The understanding of the mechanism is of immense interest for drug
development and screening of combinatorial syntheses.
The advances
in analytical instrumentation, especially in mass spectrometry,
have enabled access to information on the identity and quantity
of the metal species in biological systems at the molecular level.
This has suddenly resulted in the proliferation of new terms related
to analytical chemistry of trace metals in biology and medicine:
metallome and metallomics, metalloproteomics, metallo-metabolomics,
ionomics, heteroatom-tagged proteomics not to mention but a few
of them. On the other hand, the number of mass spectrometric techniques
available creates confusion in terms of which technique should be
used to which analytical task.
Therefore it
is a matter of interest for ACD to define the terms in this emerging
area and to critically evaluate the role of analytical tools in
the context of quality of results obtained. The related projects
include: the definition of terms related to speciation analysis
(PAC,
2000, 72, 1453-1470) and Terminology in mass spectrometry,
recently approved under the coordination of Kermit Murray (IUPAC
project 2003-056-2-500).
New
ACD Funded projects, May 2004
In its April/May
funding round the ACD voted strongly in favour of supporting the
project "Standardization of analytical approaches and analytical
capacity building in Africa". This is an inter-Divisional project
with the Division for Chemistry of the Environment (DCE). The contribution
by the ACD will be $5000, half of the total of $10000 requested
from IUPAC. Final approval and commencement of the Project awaits
a favourable decision from the World Bank and UNESCO who will be
the major sponsors ($200000).
Another project
supported by the Division is "Terminology
on separation of macromolecules". This is an inter-Divisional
project with Division IV, Macromolecular Chemistry. Division IV
is the 'lead Division'. The ACD has committed $1500 to this project.
The Division
officers have considered support for the inter-Divisional (I, III,
V) project on "Reference Methods, Standards and applications
of photoluminescence" (San Roman and Brouwer). This request
was 'out-of-cycle' with the Division's funding round so advice was
taken from 4 Division V reviewers. Division III (Organic and macromolecular)
is the 'lead Division'. The ACD will contribute $2500.
New
Ideas for new projects
The next issue
of Teamwork will feature ideas that have been suggested for
new projects. If you would like to make suggestions for inclusion
in that list please let the editor of Teamwork know.