Welcome to Sigma-Aldrichs' ChemBlog, an industry-first webtool for open scientific discussion.  We aim to highlight innovative technologies as well as to share great success stories in which chemists invented solutions to key challenges facing 21st century science.  Your first question would be:  what will you the reader find exploring this discussion?  Here are a few of the topics or areas (initially) that we hope will provoke stimulating thoughts and intellectual dialogue among the chemical community:

· Journal articles focusing on notable contributions to the field of chemistry.
· Invited posts by scientic thought leaders covering their published research.
· Upcoming chemistry conferences such as the Gordon conference and the related symposium presentations.
· Major advances in chemistry related to improving our quality of living.
· Chemists in the news including press releases, science policy decisions, Nobel Prize winners, etc.
· Sharing our own collaborative projects executed with external research teams.

We intend to focus mainly on cutting-edge trends in catalysis and reagents for mediating organic synthetic transformations.  Simply stated it is our desire to facilitate open discussion related to innovation and subsequent application to industry processes.  We also want to advance science for our clients by following the philosophy that customer-centricity will drive the success of both sides.  The fields of catalysis, materials science, and drug discovery are strongly defined by the qualities above, but with differing rates of maturity as subdisciplines of chemistry.  Recent trends suggest that the rate of new technology launch is increasing, subsequently leading to shorter lifetimes for a given product to reach projected usability in a reaction paradigm.

These discussions will then present the opportunity to illuminate recent progress in high potency areas of catalysis such as C-H activation, metathesis, and oxidative processes as related to the atom-efficient production of more complex organic molecules.  Perhaps we can even shed new insight in the catalytic, oxidative activation of methane to methanol or the selective de-hydrogenation of alkanes, both considered Holy Grails in modern day chemistry.

We will be adding posts regularly, so feel free to come back frequently to see what topics are being covered.  As a complement to your reading, please send any comments responding to all entries by logging in to our user-friendly blog site.  If you would like to contact us via e-mail, please send a message to chemblogs@sial.com.