The Cronin Group

Research in the Cronin Group is motivated by the fascination for complex chemical systems, and the desire to construct complex functional molecular architectures that are not based on biologically derived building blocks.

Cronin Group take robotic steps towards “Artificial Chemical Evolution”

In a breakthrough published in Nature Communications, Prof Cronin and his group have described the robotically-facilitated evolution of oil droplets. The group used a custom built robot based on a RepRap 3D printer which generates the droplets, measures their fitness against a fitness function, and then uses a genetic algorithm to generate a new population. By demonstrating that these could be viable “chemical protocell models” as they can be evolved yet are based upon simple chemical ingredients, Prof Cronin hopes that we can start to answer some important questions about the origin of life.

Open Access paper in Nature Communicatsions

News item on University of Glasgow website

Article in Wired

Article at Phys.org

Article in Nature Chemistry News and Views

Prof. Leroy (Lee) Cronin

Prof Leroy (Lee) Cronin
Regius Chair of Chemistry
Advanced Research Centre (ARC)
Level 5, Digital Chemistry
University of Glasgow
11 Chapel Lane
Glasgow G11 6EW
Tel: +44 141 330 6650
Email: lee.cronin@glasgow.ac.uk

Latest Publications

513. Robotic exploration of amino-acid functionalised molybdenum blue polyoxometalate nanoclusters

512. A programmable modular robot for the synthesis of molecular machines

511. Compression of Molybdenum Blue Polyoxometalate Cluster Rings

510. High-Nuclearity Polyoxometalate-Based Metal–Organic Frameworks for Photocatalytic Oxidative Cleavage of C−C Bond

509. Breaking the Boundary of Gigantic Molybdenum Blue Clusters: From Half-Closed {Mo₈₅} to {Mo₁₇₂} Dimer

508. Operational considerations for approximating molecular assembly by Fourier transform mass spectrometry

507. Reaction blueprints and logical control flow for parallelized chiral synthesis in the Chemputer

506. Experimentally measured assemblyindices are required to determine the threshold for life

505. Algorithm-driven robotic discovery of polyoxometalate-scaffolding metal–organic frameworks

504. Reaction: Programmable chemputable click chemistry

See All

The Cronin Group

Cronin Group take robotic steps towards “Artificial Chemical Evolution”

Prof. Leroy (Lee) Cronin

Latest Publications

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