Making use of corridor meeting space in the Cairns Family Health and Bioscience Research Complex, Chemistry professor Jeffrey Atkinson maps out a chart under the watchful eye of biotechnology master’s student Nick Krueger. “We were talking about our work trying to understand why certain forms of vitamin E are found to have special biological activities. We have hypothesized that the chemistry may involve the reaction of a metabolite of these forms, called quinones, with reactive parts of proteins containing sulfur called thiols. Nick is performing reactions to measure how fast the vitamin E quinones react with thiols and we were trying to understand an unexpected result.”