KARACHI, March 11: About 24 scientists from within the country and abroad delivered lectures and made presentations on the third day of the Eurasia Conference on Chemical Sciences, which will conclude here on Tuesday.

Prof S. Samar Hasnain from the University of Southampton, UK, discussed the chemistry of metals and their role in the functioning of biologically important proteins. He informed that about 30 per cent of all known proteins contained metal ions, which were the essential part of the proteins performing wide variety of chemical reactions in the biosphere.

In his lecture on “Molecular Approaches to Information Technology Materials”, Prof Youngkyu Do from Korea presented the molecules as prime candidates for new materials for information technology. He said molecules that had certain functions could emerge as candidates for new materials suitable to embodying the concepts of small size, light weight and high efficiency in the areas of electronics, information technology, materials, energy and others.

He informed the audience that social demands for new functional molecules were ever increasing. His research group has taken molecular approaches to synthesize molecular magnets as data storage materials, single site homogeneous organometallic catalysts for special polymers and organic electro-luminescent compounds as display materials, he added.

Prof Bernd Michael Rode of Austria correlated in theoretical approaches to experimental work in solution chemistry. He discussed the predictive power of modern simulation techniques and referred to the present limits by giving a variety of examples dealing with microscopic structure of mixed solvents, ion solution in pure and mixed liquids and ligand exchange processes in hydrated ions.

He said the use of simulation techniques would lead to the review of some fundamental models and concepts in practice to predict the experimental results in modern research. According to him, the theoretical research was of prime importance as it was getting cheaper day-by-day with expansion of information technology.

Prof H. Nakagowa from Japan highlighted the importance of marine resources to get biologically and pharmacologically important natural products. He expressed the view that marine organisms were enormous resources of natural products with biological activities and still were pharmacologically unexplored resources.