Chemistry in Pictures: Growth

You’ve seen photoswitchable chemicals before, in toys that change color in the sun. In fact, your vision depends on photoswitchable chemicals; when the photosensitive molecules in your eye absorb light, a chemical bond within them switches from a bent, cis, configuration to a straighter, trans, configuration. Tufan Mukhopadhyay, a postdoc in the Dirk Trauner lab at New York University, is making lipids that can do the same trick, which he uses to study the role of lipids in cellular signaling. “These photolipids can switch between a trans and a cis form when irradiated with light and therefore provide in-cellulo optical control with spatio-temporal precision.” When he was purifying one batch of photolipids, the compound crystallized inside a round-bottom flask. The result, Mukhopadhyay says, looked like a painting, so he grabbed this photograph.

Submitted by Tufan Mukhopadhyay

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