49th Annual RSC Scottish Regional Organic Division meeting

This year’s Royal Society of Chemistry Organic Division Scottish Regional (Perkin) Meeting took place on 7 January 2021, despite the challenges posed by a socially distanced world, by moving on-line. The annual Perkin meeting traditionally moves around the chemistry departments of the Scottish universities and this year was Heriot-Watt University’s turn.

The meeting attracted around 180 attendees from Heriot-Watt, Glasgow, St. Andrews, Edinburgh, Strathclyde, Aberdeen, Dundee and a few from industry. In another slight change, the seven speakers were largely early career researchers (PhD, PDRA and early academics), providing an excellent platform for them to disseminate their research and to gain valuable CV points.

The themes of the meeting covered diverse topics in organic chemistry, ranging from photocatalysis in flow, to new approaches in drug discovery and exploring biosynthetic pathways, which set-up the plenary talk wonderfully. The plenary was given by our invited speaker, Professor Wilfred van der Donk, who is the 2020 recipient of the Pedler Award for organic chemistry. This was awarded for the combined application of organic chemistry, molecular biology, and biochemistry to study post-translationally modified peptides and phosphonate natural products.

Professor van der Donk’s superb talk “Remarkable Chemistry During the Biosynthesis of Natural Products” guided us through his lab’s work on studying the biosynthesis of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) and phosphonate natural products, and discussed some surprising chemistry that came out of this.

The poster competition, sponsored by the Royal Society of Chemistry, Asynt, Fluorochem and Advion/Interchim, was held on-line, with around 20 presenters posting their brilliant posters via Twitter. If you missed the live event, many of the posters are still available to view using the Twitter hashtag #RSCPerkin2021. The organisers are grateful to the work of Chris Thomson (PhD student at Heriot-Watt) who organised the Twitter posters.

Poster prizes were awarded to Matthew Williams (Glasgow), Maria Rodrigues-Rios (Edinburgh), Joshua Clark (St Andrews), Liam Wilson (Strathclyde) and Maciej Kucharski (Edinburgh). Congratulations to all of the prize winners and thanks to everyone who presented their posters for showing off your fascinating research!

Thanks to everyone who attended and sponsored the event, and we look forward to seeing everyone in person next year.

The organising committee (Dr Graeme Barker and Dr Chris Coxon)