Halogen Bonds??

Hello from ACS!! The conference started today and I thought I’d start posting some of the stuff I learned while it’s still fresh. We were at a medical science poster session today and were treated to an elaborate talk with a computational chemist working on modeling drug molecules and the systems they work with to better understand how structure relates to efficacy and how we can improve current drugs. One of the things he talked about was halogen bonds, which are apparently similar to hydrogen bonds in that they’re dipole-dipole type interactions (http://www.halogenbonding.eu/halogenbonding.php, I did some back ground before sharing this) caused by uneven electron distribution in halogen atoms. They’re even the reason the thyroid needs iodine to function, because one key hormone, thyroxine, in the thyroid relies on iodine to interact with an oxygen on another molecule (http://www.pnas.org/content/101/48/16789.long). He claims that materials chemists have been using halogen bonds for quite some time without many of us even being aware, but as you can see, they’re biologically useful too!