NEWS OF THE WEEK
EUROPEANS GROW CROP SPENDING AGRICULTURE: The locus of investment in production, R&D facilities will be the U.S.
B
AYER CROPSCIENCE, BASF, and Syngenta
continue to ratchet up spending on agricultural products including crop protection chemicals and new plant traits. Notably for these European companies, much of the investment is flowing to the U.S. Germany’s Bayer CropScience will add $1.3 billion to its capital budget, increasing total spending to $3.2 billion between 2013 and 2016. The accelerated investment will raise the output of crop protection chemicals as well as the development of soybeans and wheat with new traits. “Many industries today are facing overproduction,” said Bayer CropScience CEO Liam Condon at a recent press conference. “We are in a completely different situation: A growing global population, changing diets, and BAS F
New greenhouses are part of BASF’s expansion in North Carolina.
GERMANES ACHIEVE A GROWTH SPURT ACS MEETING NEWS: Chemists devise synthesis of longer chain heavy analogs of alkanes
A phenylisopropyl hexagermane.
ARNIE RHEINGOLD
T
HE PERIODIC NATURE of the elements
foretells that silicon, germanium, and tin in group 14 should behave like carbon positioned above them and form linear chain molecules. Chemists have had success in making polymeric materials from silicon, germanium, and tin and oligomers of silicon and tin as short-chain models for the polymers. However, they have had limited luck in developing a suitable highyield synthesis of germanium oligomers. The promise of new optical and electronic properties of the germanium compounds has prompted one research team to keep trying. Kimberly D. Roewe and Charles S. Weinert of Oklahoma State University and coworkers have now reported a synthetic method for making linear germanes, including a hexagermane compound—the longest linear molecular germane characterized to date. Roewe CEN.ACS.ORG
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increasing weather volatility are affecting food supply and need to be addressed today.” Bayer will build a plant in Mobile, Ala., to produce the herbicide glufosinate ammonium, marketed in the U.S. as Liberty. Demand for Liberty is on the upswing, thanks to the emergence of weeds resistant to glyphosate, a widely used herbicide also known as Roundup. The facility will cost about $500 million to construct and is expected to begin production in late 2015. In North Carolina, meanwhile, the chemical giant BASF has opened a $33 million expansion of its research facilities in Research Triangle Park. The addition includes 80,000 sq ft of office, laboratory, and greenhouse facilities dedicated to plant biotechnology and insect control research. The company moved the headquarters of its plant science business from Germany to Research Triangle Park in 2012 following the rejection by European governments of genetically modified crop technology. Syngenta, based in Switzerland, is also spending big to increase research capacity in Research Triangle Park. Having recently opened an advanced crop lab at the research hub, it now plans to spend $94 million to add 200,000 sq ft of laboratory and office space. The facility will be used for discovery and development of traits that help crops tolerate climate variability and combat stresses such as drought. Syngenta plans to begin construction later this year.—MELODY BOMGARDNER
and Weinert presented their work in talks last week in the Division of Inorganic Chemistry at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Indianapolis. The researchers started by ring-opening a cyclic phenyl-substituted tetragermane they had synthesized previously and adding hydrogen to the ends of the Ge4 chain. They subsequently treated the tetragermane with an isopropylgermanium amide, which enabled them to attach a germanium unit to each end of the chain to form the Ge6 molecule (Chem. Commun. 2013, DOI: 10.1039/c3cc45450a). “This is an important accomplishment,” said organometallic chemist Lawrence R. Sita of the University of Maryland, College Park. Germanium lies at an interesting part of the periodic table, Sita said. It is not quite a formal nonmetal like silicon or a metal like tin. “Chemists a generation ago first explored the related silicon and tin chemistry but left off without nailing down the germanium analogs,” Sita added. The Ge6 compound is the first germane long enough to exhibit luminescence, Weinert said. But more dramatic, he noted, is Ge6’s dichroism. When polarized light is shined on the colorless material in one direction, the crystals appear off-white. But when polarized light is shined from a different direction, the crystals exhibit a striking blue color. The way the molecules stack together imparts a type of chirality responsible for the color shift, Weinert suggested. This property could allow the material to be used as an optical filter, he said.—STEVE RITTER
SEPTEMBER 16, 2013
