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Extreme Lego: Building with Atoms

If you ever played with Lego as a child, you’ll know the pleasure that comes from creating new structures from tiny building blocks. At Cape Breton University, researchers are taking that activity to the atomic level to build compounds for the latest technologies.

Led by Dr. Matthias Bierenstiel, an assistant professor of chemistry, students have helped create more than 50 compounds new to science.

These materials have many potential applications in areas such as pharmaceuticals and biochemistry, but the main focus of the research is catalysts — substances that increase the rate of a chemical reaction without being consumed in the process.

Nearly all catalysts today have a single metal centre attached to an organic molecule, or ligand. Bierenstiel is using a special class of elements known as transition metals to attach two centres to each ligand.

Although there have been four Nobel prizes awarded for work in this area, much remains to be discovered about these compounds. There have been some promising early studies: in one case a catalyst with a double-metal centre was shown to be 100,000 times more productive than its single-centre counterpart.

This sort of research is of fundamental importance to chemists as they strive to make reactions faster, more efficient and more selective. For instance, one important goal today is the conversion of methane gas into methanol, a more easily distributed fuel. As Bierenstiel puts it, anyone who solves this puzzle will extend our fossil fuel supply by about a century — and become “richer than Bill Gates.”

Once the compounds are made they have to be analyzed. For this, Bierenstiel and his team of enthusiastic undergraduates use state-of-the-art instruments, including a new $400,000 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer, bought by CBU with major funding from Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation. The NMR spectrometer allows researchers to image their new compounds at a molecular level.

Dr. Bierenstiel came to Canada from Germany, as an undergraduate on a one-year international scholarship. He fell in love with Canada (and his future wife) and has been here ever since. After research at the universities of Munich, Guelph and Alberta, he chose CBU because it allows him to balance his teaching and work with undergraduate students with world-class research.