The first paper from our collaboration with Thijs Stuyver’s group at Chimie ParisTech is published in Chemistry Europe. This computational work shows that electric field effects are likely responsible for the reported nonenzymatic reactions between ribose and phosphate or uracil within aqueous microdroplets. Interestingly, the electric fields also are found to have a large effect on the conformational preferences of small molecules, which will need to be taken into account in future calculations within electric fields. Congrats to Maciej and Javier!
