Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

If you are looking for an answer to a certain question, nature is the place to look. Nature can give us everything we need but of course it can be very complex and we need to be very careful. My work has included looking at crystal structures of organic molecules found in nature (natural products) - what they look like and how they interact.

When we look at the 3D structure of the molecule, the handedness of the molecule is very important as sometimes different enantiomorphs can have totally different properties.

For example a drug, thalidomide, was developed and distributed in the 1970s that was based on natural products to help cure morning sickness. While natural products have only molecules of one hand, the molecules of the synthesized commercial drug, thalidomide, being man-made, had two hands. When administered, the other hand molecule of this drug actually caused severe birth defects and therefore had disastrous effects.

This led to many questions about synthesis of compounds found in nature, for example, pesticides have been synthesized based on the properties of natural product compounds and then used to spray crops which are then made into the food that we eat - however what are the effects of the other hand molecule? It is imperative to test the both enantiomorphs of the synthesized molecule in order to ensure that the non-natural enantiomorph is safe to be used first before commercializing such pesticides. Otherwise chiral separation has to be performed and only the natural enantiomorph is to be used for commercialization.

I am a small molecule x-ray crystallographer and have always been interested in the wide potential this area of science has to offer. My focus is in solving the 3D structures of small molecules; looking for molecules of interest that may have potential applications in medicine as well as possessing non-linear optical and fluorescent properties.

My research group is especially interested in finding useful natural product compounds that can be used as medicine. We are also interested in supramolecular networks in organic/metal organic crystals.

In 2001, my group discovered a new 2nd-order temperature-dependent reversible ferroelastic phase transition which was eventually named as FAST (Fun Anwar Suchada Transition). Since then, we have discovered many more examples of FAST, including 1st order phase transitions. We have explored the behavior/mechanism of FAST which were initiated by the collaborative interaction between hydrogen bonds and lattice phonons in these crystals. A macroscopic based on Landau Theory and a microscopic theory based on Quantum Mechanics has been developed to explain the mechanism of the 2nd-order FAST. Continuing search for further examples of FAST is being conducted.