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Posted April 17, 2000

Gold Research Leads to Russian Collaboration

The tendency for gold atoms to form chemical chains has led to a new link between the University of Maine and one of Russia's largest and oldest institutions of higher education, the Moscow State University (MSU). UMaine chemists Alice and Mitchell Bruce have developed a research collaboration with Russian scientists to study the properties of organogold compounds.

Alice Bruce gave a paper on their work at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco in March. Their research has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Under the leadership of Dmitri Lemenovskii at the MSU Department of Chemistry, Russian scientists have visited UMaine four times since 1997 to work with the Bruces and their students in Aubert Hall. Scott Larkin, a UMaine graduate student in chemistry, plans to visit Moscow in the next academic year, and the Bruces may make the trip this summer.

"We're very early in a project to see if these molecules exhibit properties that could be useful as liquid crystals," says Alice Bruce. "We're all familiar with the liquid crystal displays in our calculators, clocks and lap top computers. These compounds respond to changes in conditions such as an electrical field, temperature and so on. We want to see if adding gold to organic molecules leads to new types of liquid crystals."

Bruce first met Lemenovskii at a Gordon Research Conference in 1995. "I am interested in the biological aspects of gold and how it behaves in the body," she says. "Back in graduate school, I became intrigued by that question when my aunt began receiving gold treatments to relieve rheumatoid arthritis. I was skeptical because gold is a heavy metal, but the treatments worked for her."

There are now several, very effective gold-based drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. However, just how the drugs work is still not well understood. It is possible that gold changes the action of enzymes and affects the function of the immune system, she says.

Shortly after they came to UMaine in 1985, the Bruces secured federal grant money to study the biochemical aspects of gold compounds. Lemenovskii and his colleagues have a tradition of work in this field, says Bruce. For example, they developed a gold-based reagent that is used by laboratories around the world.

Moscow State University is one of the largest and most prestigious institutions of higher education in Russia. The chemistry department alone has several thousand faculty and students, she adds.

The federally funded collaboration has enabled the Russian scientists to pursue research that would be difficult under tight financial circumstances in their own laboratories. To date, the UMaine-MSU group has created new compounds by attaching gold atoms to organic molecules at specific locations in the molecular structure. The next step will be to investigate how those molecules behave under a variety of conditions.

They are also working with Jim McClymer in the UMaine Dept. of Physics and Astronomy who does research on liquid crystals. A light polarizing microscope will be used to view the new compounds as the temperature is changed.

"If the molecules line up in new ways, they will change the way light passes through them," says Bruce. "We should see the result."

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