Yogesh Kumar Maurya looked at this flask in which he’d collected a purified reaction product, only to discover the compound had spontaneously crystallized into this coral-like pattern. Maurya, a postdoc in Aurelio Mateo-Alonso’s lab at the Basque Center for Macromolecular Design and Engineering, investigates large π-conjugated aromatic systems, like nanographene and porphyrins. He saw these crystals as he was wrapping up the first reaction of a synthetic route for making a part of a larger molecule. After such a surprising start, who knows what the rest of his synthesis has in store for him?
Submitted by Yogesh Kumar Maurya