 My name is Nick White and I lead the Super Molecular Research Group at the Research School of Chemistry at ANU. So then in an earlier video, I talked about why chemists might want to make new molecules and I kind of hinted at some of the work we've done. But now you understand hydrogen bonding, I can explain a little bit more about what we do and why we do it. So there's sort of lots of ways of making molecules that perhaps traditional approach is to take an existing molecule and then change some bonds and change some atoms using covalent bonds. Another option is to make a polymer where you essentially make lots and lots of bonds really really quickly and then the kind of a third approach is something called self-assembly. So what we do is we try and make relatively small molecules that will assemble into something much bigger and more complicated through hydrogen bonds. And hydrogen bonds are really good for this because they're quite weak and you might think that's kind of counter intuitive why would we want to use a weak bond? But the advantage of a weak bond is it can kind of form and break and so it has this reversible nature, it can error correct. So if you're trying to assemble something really big and something goes slightly wrong along the way the system can basically correct itself and get to your desired product. And so this is what nature does to assemble your DNA double helix. It's two big strands held together in a double helix through hydrogen bonds and this error correction because the bonds are quite weak is really really important. So hydrogen bonds are really common, they're very important to the properties of water and actually we do a lot of our work in water. And so what we're doing is making two classes of materials that have large channels inside them like the one you can see behind me. And so these materials can be used for things like trapping gases, so perhaps dangerous gases. And that's because they can interact favorably with the edges of the channels they can sit nicely in there. Another thing we've done is work to build kind of protective cages for enzymes. So enzymes are biological reactors if you like, they do reactions really well but they're incredibly fragile, they're prone to unwinding and falling apart. So what we have developed are some systems that can assemble around them to act like a cage to prevent them from unwinding. The nice thing is though because they've got channels, chemicals can still get into the enzyme, the enzyme can still do its thing and let the product out but it can't kind of unravel and fall apart. So the thing that makes materials really quite unique is that we're using these weak forces hydrogen bonding but they actually give it some really unusual and really important and beneficial properties.