...and while he was there, he built Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

All you want to do after a transatlantic flight is get to your hotel room as quickly as possible, shower, and then maybe have a nap. If immigration and customs isn't bad enough, when you arrive at this hellish hub you are only briefly reunited with your luggage before you hand it over to be conveyed to a different building in the airport, wondering if you will ever see it again...

After that, you get to go through security once more, just as if you were about to get on a flight! Shoes off, belt off, laptop out, set off buzzer, remember phone is in pocket, go through again, drop your loose change... precisely which circle of hell is this?

Next is the train ride to the faraway luggage terminal on a vehicle that accelerates and decelerates with such G-force it could be used to condition astronauts. Finally we get our bags and escape the underworld in a taxi, driven, may I add, in a similar manner to the aforementioned train - a 20 minute stay in purgatory before we reach our paradise - downtown Atlanta. (OK, ‘paradise’ might be a stretch, but trust me, compared with the airport...)

I'm not looking forward to the return journey this afternoon, but other than that, it's been just peachy. Atlanta - thank you - you've been a perfect host.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At the Wednesday morning session of the Polymers for Enabling Nanoscale Patterning symposium, C Grant Willson came to bury 157 nm lithography, not to praise it... and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography got the adjacent plot. Although there are technological challenges to face, Willson argued that physics and chemistry would not be the problem – it’s the economics, stupid.

He used a comparison with commercial aviation to highlight his point. Making faster airplanes isn’t all that difficult; making money from them is – where’s Concorde now? Just as commercial aviation has reached a speed plateau and seeks to expand by changing other variables such as capacity (see the humongous Airbus A380), so the drive to use smaller and smaller wavelengths for photolithography is no longer the focus of the semiconductor industry. Techniques to improve the resolution of established 193 nm lithography - such as immersion lithography – may be the way forward.

Willson then went on to discuss imprint lithography techniques, such as his step-and-flash nanoimprint lithography, which set the scene for the rest of the session. Although it is quite clear that optical lithography is the current standard, nanoimprint lithography seems set to make a big impression.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today, Professor John Bercaw talked about the kinetics and mechanism of methane C-H activation via electrophilic platinum complexes. They used sapphire NMR tubes to analyze methane activation kinetics at extremely high pressures (300-1000 psi of methane in the paper, but Bercaw mentioned that they safely could go up to 3000 psi).

In their recent JACS paper, Owen et al. acknowledged "Dan Nieman, Dean Roddick, Steve Olson, Mike Roy, David Law, Glenn Sunley, and Marc Payne for assistance with design and construction of the high-pressure NMR equipment." I've scoured the Bercaw group homepage and the internet trying to find a picture of this device, but I wasn't able to find one...

What's your favorite device that was constructed to address a scientific problem? Maybe Professor Patrick Brown's cDNA microarrayer? Or one of Professor George Whitesides's self-assembled (functional) electronic devices? Or Professor Peter Seeberger's solid-phase oligosaccharide synthesizer?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 01:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Both the ACS and APS seem to have used the ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe’ principle to assign session rooms at their spring meetings. Most of the sessions in Atlanta are held in the gargantuan Georgia World Congress Center, which is undoubtedly visible from orbit – just getting from one session to the next requires hiking boots, a compass and a couple of Power Bars.

Location aside, the biggest issue is space. At the Meijer award symposium on Sunday, not only were all of the seats filled, but the audience were standing three deep at the back of the room and more were sat on the floor at the front. When I went to some organic sessions on Monday, there were no more than 15 people in a room twice the size!

Even if you are lucky enough to get a seat in the popular sessions, let’s hope you like the people sat next to you... the seats are linked together just like they were at elementary school, and unless you have a supermodel figure (and I haven’t seen too many of those here), you get to know your neighbours quite well. And as with every other ACS meeting I’ve attended, the seats are specially designed to make you lose all feeling in the lower half of your body – almost certainly a ploy to stop you from getting up and leaving the talks...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

More ACS news by me at the Nature Newsblog. I’ve got fried food and chemists being snarky about physicists and a guy whose life mission is to keep your beer cold. Sounds like a party to me.

Posted by Emma Marris at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There may be big money in small science, but not as much as you might think. Mike Holman from Lux Research – a leading nanotech research and advisory firm – gave an interesting presentation this afternoon about the barriers to nanotechnology commercialization. He talked of a ‘nanotechnology value chain’ rather than a specific market, and of the discipline being a ‘broad enabling technology’ that allows for incremental improvements to existing products, rather than generating completely new ones.

The total amount of nanotech funding is increasing, but it was interesting to note that whereas corporate cash is more often focused on electronics and information technology, that from the government is targetted towards healthcare and the life sciences. It seems, therefore, that the barriers to commercialization are not necessarily technological or economic ones, but also cultural and organizational – the latter two obstacles highlighted with amusing quotes about nanotechnology 'just being a fad'.

As the session continued, however, it became clear (at least to this member of the audience), that there is another problem. When the worlds of science and business collide the words of science and business do not. What is a ‘dollar investment gap’? I think an ‘IP conduit’ featured in a few Star Trek episodes. I understand ‘cash flow’, but what do ‘development platform’ and ‘integration services’ really mean? As for ‘roadmapping’, I checked the OED, so don’t try and tell me it’s a real word. Come to think of it though, as chemists, we’re just as bad. If we start mumbling about 'nucleophiles' or 'electrophiles', non-chemists wouldn’t have a clue. Worse still, polite conversations rapidly become uncomfortable should we happen to mention 'cleavage reactions' or 'backside attack'!

Nonetheless, nanotechnology is beginning to have a commercial impact and so it doesn’t really matter if we’re not all speaking the same language. After all, the money will do the talking.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry symposium given this afternoon in the Division of Organic Chemistry recognized and honored the outstanding research accomplishments of Barbara Imperiali of MIT, in addition to featuring fantastic talks from Virginia Cornish, Ben Cravatt, and Dennis Dougherty.

Professor Dougherty of Caltech recounted a very amusing but quite helpful trick taught to him by Professor Imperiali (from her days as a professor at Caltech) for remembering the 1-letter amino acid code of tryptophan, W, which is to think of "twyptophan" (as if you were Elmer Fudd). Now I know I will never have future trouble remembering what “W” stands for!

I wish I had a trick for remembering the 1-letter codes of glutamine and glutamic acid (I’m Googling this as I write, I’m embarrassed to say, since I honestly can’t remember which is which!). Does anyone have any helpful tips for remembering these or any of the 1-letter amino acid codes? Please share!

Allison Doerr (Assistant Editor, Nature Methods)

Posted by Allison Doerr at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning, Professor John Hartwig was awarded the "ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry." In his talk, he discussed a number of recent results from his laboratory, including the insertion of an iridium complex into an N-H bond of ammonia, the intermolecular hydroamination of vinylarenes, an iridium catalyst able to perform enantioselective allylic aminations, and some of his recent mechanistic studies of the palladium-catalyzed amination of aryl halides (a collaboration between Hartwig's group, Donna Blackmond's group at Imperial College, and Stephen Buchwald's group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Earlier in the session, Robert Bergman talked about some of the work his group has done (in collaboration with Kenneth Raymond's group) which involved C-H bond activation of aldehydes using an iridium catalyst and guest/host chemistry - maybe it's just Hartwig's and Bergman's enthusiasm rubbing off on me, but I think that iridium (which was "named after the Latin word for rainbow (iris ...) because many of its salts are strongly colored") might be my new favorite transition metal...

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

There is more ACS news over at the Nature Newsblog, from the true tale behind surimi to a new data standard for thermodynamics and a bit of periodic table tie spotting

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

After wandering around the Sci-Mix poster session this evening, it seemed that the Sun Dial bar and restaurant would be an ideal place to unwind. Ascending to the heavens in a glass elevator, a small band of us weary delegates made our way to this revolutionary establishment that sits atop the Westin hotel in downtown Atlanta. As we settled into our seats, we noticed the Atlanta skyline sliding past us at a slightly unsettling pace, prompting one of our number to suggest that the rotation should be a little slower. “It’s not as though they have a big dial out the back that they can just twist”, I scoffed – whereupon the nice waitress standing over my shoulder informed me that indeed they did, and that she would slow our journey for us...

(A slightly embarrassed) Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This afternoon at the ACS meeting I attended the Analytical Awardees Presentations featuring the four winners of the ACS analytical awards.

The winner of the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Mass Spectrometry was Richard Caprioli of Vanderbilt University. First reported in Nature Medicine in 2001, Professor Caprioli has been developing and applying a technique called MALDI MS Imaging. This is a fascinating technique where a tissue slice is placed directly on a sample plate, prepped with a MALDI matrix, pixilated into discrete spots, and analyzed by MALDI-TOF. The proteins present in each spot can be identified and mapped back to the location in the tissue from where it came. This results in the construction of a protein map of the tissue where different colors can be assigned to various proteins of interest and intensities reflect protein concentrations.

What’s really intriguing about this technique is the potential for a paradigm shift in the way that clinical pathologists and histologists do their jobs. For example, a histologist traditionally would use a stain to define a tumor margin in a biopsy, but the molecular profile revealed by the MALDI MS image can expose oncogenic proteins found out-of-bounds of the tumor. This can help guide surgeons in the removal of all cancerous tissue, reducing the chance of relapse.

Apparently, when Professor Caprioli first told colleagues about his idea of sticking tissue slices into a mass spectrometer, they all thought he was a little nuts. His work is a fine example of how what first seems like a zany idea in analytical chemistry can turn out to have a very practical application in the clinic!

Allison Doerr (Assistant Editor, Nature Methods)

Posted by Allison Doerr at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Arsenic really isn’t very good for you, in fact, it’s a perennial favourite of your amateur – or indeed, professional – poisoner. Even if your loved ones are not surreptitiously sprinkling it on your cornflakes, you may still be ingesting a little bit too much of the stuff. Vicki Colvin from Rice University gave a talk this afternoon addressing the problem of arsenic contamination in drinking water – not only is this a problem in poorer third-world nations, but a map of the North Eastern USA was covered with an alarming number of large red dots. Red dots are never a good thing.

Arsenic finds its way into the water supply from both natural (it’s in the soil) and anthropogenic sources – and has been linked with bladder cancer. Although some ferns naturally sequester arsenic, it’s a slow process and not everyone grows them in their back garden. It turns out, however, that iron oxide is good at binding arsenic – an alloy structure forms on the surface, which continues to irreversibly adsorb arsenic in a multilayer fashion. Colvin exploits this phenomenon for the removal of arsenic compounds from water by using iron oxide nanoparticles.

Why go nano? Well, there are two reasons: (i) smaller particles have a higher surface area-to-volume ratio, i.e., you can bind more arsenic, and (ii) the magnetic properties of these nanoparticles are quite handy – you suck up the arsenic and then drag the whole nasty mess out of solution with a magnet. There is, however, a Goldilocks effect: if the nanoparticles are too small you need a fancy bad-science-fiction-movie super magnet to get the job done, if the nanoparticles are too large, they become magnetized and can’t be pulled away from the magnet even after it is turned off. 12 nm is just right.

The most intriguing part came near the end of the presentation, when Colvin suggested that there could be an alternative and renewable route for making the iron oxide nanoparticles. Bugs! Certain bacteria produce iron oxide nanoparticles with a very narrow size distribution and could, in theory, be used in a biosynthetic process. Ultimately, this research could result in an inexpensive point-of-use product for the removal of arsenic from water – I’ll drink to that!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

PubChem was created in 2004 as part of the NIH Roadmap - it was intended to be a "new and comprehensive database of chemical structures and their biological activities ... [which would contain] compound information from the scientific literature as well as screening and probe data from the [Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network]."

Nature Chemical Biology was one of the first journals to deposit chemical structures into this database, and according to Stephen Bryant, the amount of data is rapidly growing: the database now contains over five million unique structures and more than 190 bioassays.

It sounds like this database will make it easier for chemists and biologists to find interesting bioactive small-molecules. And the best part? Like PubMed, the data is freely available to the entire scientific community...

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 05:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier this morning, Professor Larry Overman gave a talk in a session honoring Professor Richard Heck's contributions to organopalladium chemistry.

Overman talked about intramolecular Heck reactions, and he highlighted the stereocontrolled total synthesis of (+/-)-gelsemine, the enantioselective total synthesis of (+)-minfiensine, and discussed an unpublished synthesis of guanacastepene N.

If you're looking for some of his work that's "hot off the press," there are two recent papers in Organic Letters from Overman & Watson: "Diastereoselection in the Formation of Spirocyclic Oxindoles by the Intramolecular Heck Reaction" and "Diastereoselection in the Formation of Contiguous Quaternary Carbon Stereocenters by the Intramolecular Heck Reaction."

The session was packed, and Overman certainly convinced me that intramolecular Heck reactions are a powerful way to make contiguous quaternary carbon stereocenters, even "in situations of considerable steric congestion." If you were there, what did you think?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nanotechnology is one of three featured themes here at the ACS meeting and there are over 1,000 talks under this broad umbrella. It is no mere coincidence, therefore, that I am here to promote Nature Nanotechnology, a new journal from Nature Publishing Group. And this week is an important one: we are now open for business. Our Call for Papers has been announced, and if you don’t manage to pick up one of the glossy leaflets scattered throughout the Georgia World Congress Center, please go and investigate our website, or come and talk to me at the exposition tomorrow at 10 am. (NPG booth #414). Our first issue will appear in October of 2006, so don’t delay, submit your best nano-related work as soon as you return home from Atlanta.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I navigated the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center (yes, all three buildings!) on the first day of the ACS meeting, it was gratifying to see the large number of young faces in the crowd. Although I’m always impressed by senior scientists who share their youthful enthusiasm for chemistry, I am interested in what inspires the current generation of students to pursue careers in chemistry.

The people around us have a lot to do with our choices. I grew up in a family that included three generations of pharmacists. I recall fondly the science lore of the family--my great-grandfather mixing mentholated products in the basement of the house, my grandmother extracting compounds from garden plants right around the time quantum mechanics was making its debut, and my father’s adventures in chemistry lab in the era when NMR was the newest, greatest tool. Although chemistry was already part of my family, I was lucky to have excellent junior high and high school science teachers who nurtured my interests and challenged me scientifically and creatively.

A sense of wonder and curiosity seem equally important. I was fortunate to live in a place where I could enjoy the natural world by wandering off into a forest or sitting by a lake. In addition, when I was growing up, chemistry sets still contained interesting compounds, which allowed some reasonable level of experimentation. Although I was a big fan of crystalline cobalt (II) chloride, sulfur had to be my “go to” reagent bottle for basement experimentation. That easy-to-measure, placid yellow elemental powder made its way into many test reactions and provided hours of amusement for me, but not, I recall, for my parents.

Who or what inspired you to become a chemist? How can we continue to attract young people to chemistry? Tell us your story.

Terry L. Sheppard (Chief Editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Terry Sheppard at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It always takes me awhile to get my bearings at an ACS meeting…figuring out how to catch the shuttle bus to the convention center…finding where to pick up registration materials…searching for that ubiquitous Starbucks for some much-needed caffeine…deciding which one of five interesting symposia to attend… navigating the massive convention center…going back and forth between symposia that seem about a mile apart, only to find the order of the talks have been switched …and so on!

Today was no exception, but I did manage to drop in on one quite interesting symposium given by the Division of Chemical Information. Kicked off by the very entertaining George Whitesides from the chemistry department at Harvard, the symposium was entitled “The nuts and bolts of scholarly publishing”.

As an editor, I would have to say that Professor Whitesides has the writing process down pat (you might even say, down to a science), as he described his views on how to successfully write a research paper. He began by reminding the audience of the mantra that all good journalists know: if you fail to capture the readers’ attention in the first 2-3 sentences, you might as well forget about them reading the rest of your paper. The Introduction should state the principle result, the motivation, importance, and context in reference to prior work (which as Professor Whitesides astutely pointed out, is not only the ethical thing to do, but also a really good idea since the previous work was probably done by the referees reading the paper!). In the Results and Discussion, the principle result should be described first and in as brief of terms as possible (this is not the place to recount the long history of personal struggles in the lab!). Finally, the Conclusion should not be a reiteration of the abstract, but the place to compare the work to previous results, describe the significance of the new work, the benefits and limitations, as well as an opportunity to inject personal opinions. In addition, a good title and interesting and informative figures are absolutely crucial.

Overall, it was an engaging and instructive talk, reminding scientists of the integral role writing plays in research. After all, if you never write up your research and no one ever reads it, it might as well have never been done!

Allison Doerr (Assistant Editor, Nature Methods)

Posted by Allison Doerr at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Day 1 is over, and this one contained just the usual 24 hours, which, with the help of my friend Starbuck, passed by quite pleasantly. I spent most of it at the symposium honouring Bert Meijer, who received the ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry.

All of the speakers were united in their admiration for Meijer, but these sentiments were perhaps best (and most unconventionally) expressed by his friend and fellow Dutchman, Roeland Nolte. His talk on self-assembled polymer architectures was subtitled - "Things Bert does not believe (about my work)".

In a genuinely sincere presentation - but one with perfect comic timing - Nolte outlined a couple of projects in which it appears that Meijer's constant questioning and skepticism drove Nolte's group to gather more and more evidence to support their claims. It seems as though Meijer was won over - for today at least!

Nolte was also quite happy to point out that his Nijmegen group have won a majority of the annual football (that's soccer to all you Americans who may be reading this) matches between their two research groups...

In concluding his presentation, Nolte revealed the reason why Meijer first became interested in supramolecular polymers: one of the first hydrogen-bonded examples was reported by Jean-Marie Lehn, and Nolte claimed that Meijer entered the field because he was skeptical of Lehn's system.

It seems as though Meijer is, indeed, a skeptical chemist - something that the polymer chemistry community can be quite proud of, and thankful for.

Another early start tomorrow, and my batteries are about as low as my laptop's, so before we both go to sleep, I'm off to bed.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In The Ocean World, Jacques-Yves Cousteau wrote

From the vast expanses of its surface waters to its beaches and marshes and tidelands and mangrove swamps, from its many thousands of miles of rocky shores to its deepest and darkest abyss, the sea produces life in fantastic abundance.

Cousteau’s aquatic adventures ran through my mind when I ate lunch after Professor William Fenical's talk this morning. He was awarded the "Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products" and spoke about marine actinomycetes, microorganisms whose terrestrial cousins produce a number of natural products, including streptomycin and actinomycin.

Fenical thought that microorganisms capable of producing interesting, biologically-active natural products lived in the ocean. To find these microbes, his research group constructed new devices to collect samples from the deep sea: the “mud snapper” (200 meters deep), electric reels (1500 meters deep), and an autonomous sampling device that looked like a cross between a syringe and a pogo stick (6000 meters deep). He showed a movie of this last device: it sinks to the bottom of the ocean and the tip of the device plunges into the sediment and collects a soil sample. Then it releases its weights and shoots back up to the surface, where the samples can be retrieved and brought back to the lab.

A few years ago, his research group reported the discovery of a new marine actinomycetes (Salinospora), which produced salinosporamide A, a natural product with a fused gamma-lactam-beta-lactone bicyclic ring structure. They showed that in vitro, this compound was highly potent against a number of cancer cell lines.

Chauhan et al. recently published a Cancer Cell paper where they showed that this compound (renamed NPI-0052) was orally bioavailable and that it prolonged survival in animal tumor model studies. For these reasons, salinosporamide A/NPI-0052 is now scheduled to enter human clinical trials in the late spring or early summer.

In a Chemical & Engineering News article written earlier this year, Fenical said

Oceans not only cover more than 70% of Earth's surface, but more than 90% of the organisms in the ocean are not found on land … In one cubic centimeter of bottom sediment, there are 1 billion microbial organisms. There is a huge diversity of microscopic organisms [that may produce] potent, biologically active metabolites of unique, unprecedented structures.

Fenical's research group has identified and cultured 15 new marine phylotypes so far - including Salinispora pacifica, which was reported in a recent issue of Organic Letters and produces cyanosporasides A and B. This is only a fraction of what’s out there, but it looks like Fenical's research group is off to a good start...

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been awake for almost 24 hours now (that terrible, sweaty, fitful, semi-conscious state unique to a seat in economy class on a transatlantic flight doesn’t count as sleep), and 4000+ miles later, I’m in Atlanta, land of Coca-Cola and home of the Braves – when will they get back to the World Series I wonder? And just as it will be for me, so this city will be home for the more than 12,000 chemists attending the 2006 Spring American Chemical Society Meeting over the next 5 days.

I think one of the most common questions I’ve been asked in the last few days is this: why does the ACS meeting run Sunday through Thursday? Anyone have any suggestions, because I have no idea? More importantly perhaps, how about the location – any thoughts? Washington DC and Philadelphia (my last two ACS trips) offer plenty of sightseeing options, Anaheim has - love it or hate it - Disneyland, and it’s probably best not to get started with the distractions offered on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. If YOU were choosing, where would the next ACS meeting be – would you take a chance on Vegas, or say aloha to Honolulu?

So, it all begins tomorrow, and even though my body clock will undoubtedly be quite upset by my alarm clock, I’ll head over to the ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry in Honor of Bert Meijer symposium. Hope to see you there.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm the Chief Editor of Nature Chemical Biology. The journal’s editorial team is based in the Boston and San Francisco offices of Nature Publishing Group (NPG). We are delighted with the chemical biology community’s support of the journal since its launch in June 2005.

We are pleased to announce the arrival of the April 2006 issue of Nature Chemical Biology, in which we shine a “Spotlight on Sulfur” and its important role in biology. For a good overview of the issue, read our April Editorial, but be sure to check out:

A Review Article by Eugene Mueller—“Trafficking in persulfides: delivering sulfur in biosynthetic pathways”, which is also featured on our special Chemistry Podcast.

A Commentary on iron-sulfur clusters by Marc Fontecave—“Iron-sulfur clusters: Ever expanding roles”

A News & Views article on thionucleoside biosynthesis by Charles Lauhon, a Brief Communication on heparin biosynthesis, and a few topical Research Highlights on sulfur-related work published in other journals.

The issue also includes several examples of how chemical biologists are using small molecules to understand biological systems and provide lead compounds for therapeutic targets. For example, in a Letter to Nature Chemical Biology Steven De Wall, Brian DeDecker and colleagues showed that inorganic complexes of Pt(II), Pd(II) and Au(III) disrupt the binding of antigenic peptides to the MHC complex of the immune system, which was recently highlighted in The Economist.

Also, be sure to take a look at papers on selective estrogen receptor agonists (Bologa et al.), marine natural products that inhibit translation initiation (Bordeleau, et al.), and RNA interference screens for probing drug action (Brummelkamp, et al.).

I am headed to the ACS meeting in Atlanta tomorrow. During the ACS meeting, stop by the NPG Booth (#414) and pick up a copy of the March and April issues of Nature Chemical Biology. Also, register your name in a drawing to win print copies of all issues in the first volume of Nature Chemical Biology (2005). I hope to see you all at sessions, the meeting halls, and at the NPG booth on Monday, March 27th from 15.00 to 16.00.

Enjoy the meeting!

Terry L. Sheppard (Chief Editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Terry Sheppard at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Researchers in Japan have put a new spin on molecular machines. In the March 23 issue of Nature, Takuzo Aida and coworkers report a system in which the photoresponsive motion of a host molecule induces the controlled rotation of a guest molecule.

The design hinges upon the photoisomerization of an azobenzene group, which can be switched between cis and trans configurations when exposed to either ultraviolet or visible light. The resulting change in molecular geometry causes two porphyrin paddles to pivot around a central ferrocene unit, translating this twisting motion to a rotor-like molecule that is sandwiched between them.

The authors suggest that this proof-of-principle demonstration of coupled molecular motion may be a significant factor in the control of larger integrated systems. I guess we’ll have to wait and see – let’s hope we’re not left twisting in the wind...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 06:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Some call chemistry the “central science” and it’s not hard to see why. The huge range of projects in which chemistry researchers are involved cross paths with engineering, physics, earth sciences, medicine, and biology. We at Nature Methods are particularly interested in publishing new applications of chemical compounds, tools, or analytical methods that demonstrate potential to provide valuable novel and practical contributions to biology. We’ve got a few very nice papers in our April issue that illustrate this goal well.

From the Department of Chemistry at MIT, Alice Ting and her colleagues have successfully designed a streptavidin tetramer with only one high affinity biotin binding site. While protein chemists will appreciate the design and engineering process, cell biologists will certainly find the mutant streptavidin useful for applications such as cell surface protein labeling. (Listen to Professor Ting speak about this work on Nature’s special Chemistry Podcast.)

We also have a solid contribution from Peter Schultz at the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at Scripps. The Schultz lab has long been a leader in developing and refining a genetic method for incorporating functional unnatural amino acids into proteins; however, the method was somewhat technically challenging for biologists. Now they report a streamlined procedure for using the system in bacteria.

Sometimes, existing chemical tools or methods can find new life in biological applications. Helen Blau and her colleagues at Stanford University discovered that the small organic molecule “Lugal” available in the Promega Beta-Glo Assay System (to quantify β-galactosidase activity in cell culture), could also be used as a bioluminescent reagent to image β-galactosidase activity in living cells.

I welcome comments on these papers and hope to meet with some of you chemists at the ACS meeting with other interesting biological stories to tell!

Allison Doerr, Assistant Editor, Nature Methods

Posted by Allison Doerr at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From March 26th to the 30th, we will be attending the 2006 Spring meeting of the American Chemical Society and have put together a special website that contains:

- a list of some of the sessions the editors will be attending

- a special edition of the Nature Podcast, in which Dr. Chris Smith talks with the authors of some of the most exciting chemical and biochemical content that has appeared in recent issues of Nature, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Materials, and Nature Methods. The six papers featured on the podcast are:

Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns by Rothemund (Nature)
Structural basis for the spectral difference in luciferase bioluminescence by Nakatsu et al. (Nature)
Lab-on-a-chip: microfluidics in drug discovery by Dittrich & Manz (Nature Reviews Drug Discovery)
Trafficking in persulfides: delivering sulfur in biosynthetic pathways by Mueller (Nature Chemical Biology)
Liquid-crystalline semiconducting polymers with high charge-carrier mobility by McCulloch et al. (Nature Materials)
A monovalent streptavidin with a single femtomolar biotin binding site by Howarth et al. (Nature Methods)

- and a selection of 25 exciting chemistry papers from Nature, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Materials, and Nature Methods that can be downloaded for free during the 2006 Spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. We hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as we did!

In addition, we will be at the NPG booth (#414) at the following days and times:

Allison Doerr (Assistant Editor, Nature Methods) - Monday, March 27th from 09.30 – 10.30
Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature) - Monday, March 27th from 12.00 to 13.00
Terry Sheppard (Chief Editor, Nature Chemical Biology) – Monday, March 27th from 15.00 to 16.00
Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology) - Tuesday, March 28th from 10.00 to 11.00
Emma Marris (Washington Correspondent, Nature) - Tuesday, March 28th from 15.00 to 16.00

Please come and chat with us about your research, your thoughts about chemistry, topics we should be blogging about, or anything else you’d like to discuss. In addition, we will be adding blog entries throughout the conference, so please check back frequently to see what we’re writing about… And please feel free to leave comments responding to this (and/or any other) entry – if you would like to contact us via email, please email us at thescepticalchymist at boston.nature.com

See you at the meeting!

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)
Terry Sheppard (Chief Editor, Nature Chemical Biology)
Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)
Allison Doerr (Assistant Editor, Nature Methods)
Emma Marris (Washington Correspondent, Nature)
Jane Macmillan (Head of Marketing, Physical Sciences)
Jason Wilde (Publisher, Physical Sciences)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My trip to the ACS meeting in Atlanta is fast approaching and so planes and trains have been on my mind lately. Then yesterday, along came the rest of the story (thanks Josh!). First, there was the nanocar (see here too) and now, just rolled off the production line, is the nanotruck. Posted as a web ASAP article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Jim Tour and coworkers from Rice University in Texas report on ‘Surface-Rolling Molecules’.

These nanovehicles are comprised of three parts: fullerene ‘wheels’ are connected through alkynyl ‘axles’ to a ‘chassis’ made of either phenylene ethynylene units (the nanocar) or fused aromatic rings (the nanotruck). In the case of the truck, the authors speculate that the planar aromatic surface may act as a platform and be able to accommodate cargo – thereby distinguishing this nanotruck from your everyday nanocar. I wonder if the authors expect some readers to have no truck with their nomenclature, as the introduction to the paper contains a very carefully worded paragraph defending it..?

At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be too much mileage in the nanotruck; it is never loaded with anything, and it didn’t perform very well on a test drive. Contamination of the gold surface, and possible instability of the molecules gave rise to complicated STM results. The fullerene wheels, which complicate the synthesis and purification, might be the first to go. At the end of the paper, the authors suggest alternative molecular ‘wheels’: carboranes seem like an obvious substitute, whereas cyclodextrin-shaft complexes would be an interesting choice. Will we be seeing rotaxane nanovehicles before too long?

What else will come out of the nanogarage? Tour hints that he’s now working on nanotrains as well. Let’s just hope they’re more reliable than the ones I catch.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Nature Review Drug Discovery recently posted a "News and Analysis" article by Joanna Owens called "Funding for accelerating drug development initiative critical," which is about a new initiative launched by the United States Food and Drug Administration called "The Critical Path Initiative." According to the Critical Path website:

The Critical Path Initiative is FDA's effort to stimulate and facilitate a national effort to modernize the scientific process through which a potential human drug, biological product, or medical device is transformed from a discovery or "proof of concept" into a medical product.

To achieve this goal, Joanna says that

the FDA announced a list of 76 'opportunities', or projects, for developing new tools that could significantly improve the way that experimental drugs are tested. The opportunities cover six broad topic areas: development of biomarkers; clinical trial designs; bioinformatics; manufacturing; public health needs; and paediatrics.

So it looks like this initiative will complement the NIH Roadmap, which was launched several years ago to "identify major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that no single institute at NIH could tackle alone."

I'm not sure if any of our readers are in the pharmaceutical industry, but I would be curious to hear what you think of these initiatives. Do you think that they'll have a positive impact on human health (i.e. will these initiatives actually accelerate drug discovery and development?) If you don't think that these initiatives will actually impact the number of new drugs coming to market, what do you think can (or should) be done? And if you are an academic scientist, what do you think about (another) governmental initiative that is focused on drug discovery and development, rather than pure scientific research?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The 2005 Nobel prize in chemistry went to Yves Chauvin, Robert Grubbs, and Richard Schrock "for the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis." Olefin metathesis has been used to make a wide range of compounds, including natural products, polymers, and stabilized alpha helices that can inhibit the growth of human leukemia xenografts in vivo.

So it's not surprising that this field is still really "hot" - you can't open a chemistry journal without seeing at least one paper involving metathesis... In the March 22nd issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Hong & Grubbs reported that a ruthenium catalyst that had a poly(ethylene glycol) conjugated saturated 1,3-dimesityl-4,5-dihydroimidazol-2-ylidene ligand was able to catalyze ring-opening metathesis polymerization, ring-closing metathesis, and cross-metathesis reactions in aqueous media (Highly Active Water-Soluble Olefin Metathesis Catalyst).

There's also a nice minireview by Donohoe et al. that just appeared on Angewandte Chemie International Edition's Early View - this minireview focused on papers in which ring-closing metathesis was used to synthesize aromatic compounds, including pyrroles, furans, and quinolines (Ring-Closing Metathesis as a Basis for the Construction of Aromatic Compounds).

Although Professor Donohoe won't be speaking at the upcoming American Chemical Society meeting in Atlanta, Professor Grubbs will give three talks: "Synthesis and applications of ROMP block polymers," "Olefin metathesis catalysts for the synthesis of large and small molecules," "Organic synthesis using the olefin metathesis reactions." Of course, he won't be the only scientist talking about metathesis at the meeting - there's a whole session devoted to metathesis on Sunday afternoon ("Recent Developments in Metathesis-Related Processes").

I'll be attending the upcoming ACS meeting and will be updating this blog regularly - so if you see any of these talks, please feel free to post a comment and let me know what you thought...

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever since carbon nanotubes were first reported in Nature in 1991 by Sumio Iijima, there has been an awful lot of speculation about what they are (or will be) good for. Proposed applications range from molecular electronics, biomedical uses such as drug delivery, through to the lofty goal of a space elevator!

Well, move over CRT TV, step aside LCD TV, here comes CNT TV... an American and a Taiwanese company have joined forces and announced a venture to develop and manufacture carbon nanotube-based TVs.

Money for nothing?

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Nano - a small word, with big consequences.

Perhaps.

Like many other four-letter words, this one is quite controversial, even more so when tacked on the front of other words such as 'science' or 'technology'. Once a simple descriptor of scale, 'nano' has evolved into a highly emotive prefix, one that conjures-up many different things for many different people; from tiny self-replicating nanobots charting courses through our veins, to the revolution of computation and beyond!

Frightening some and fascinating others - after all, one man’s tiny terror is another’s miniature marvel - nano is now. With its own band of scholars and skeptics, it seems as though nanotechnology is here to stay. That being the case, what role does chemistry have to play in this truly multidisciplinary pursuit, in short, how does chemistry fit into the big (or should that be ‘small’) picture?

The message from the American Chemical Society is clear: at the 231st National Meeting later this month in Atlanta, Georgia, nanotechnology is one of three featured multidisciplinary themes. With 50 different symposia listed under this general heading, the ACS obviously recognises that chemistry is one of the fundamental foundations upon which a lot of nanotechnology is built.

The number of nanotechnology-related papers is growing rapidly, and while the pages of Nature and its other research journals have featured some pioneering nano work (as they will continue to do), other topics compete for this space. So, here at Nature Publishing Group, we feel that the time is right for a new journal, one that is dedicated specifically to nanotechnology in its broadest context. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Nature Nanotechnology.

Launching in October 2006, Nature Nanotechnology will publish high-quality original research from all areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology, including chemistry, physics, materials science, the life sciences and engineering. Each issue will feature review articles, news and views, reports highlighting important papers published in other journals, commentary and analysis. Preparations are well underway, and our Call for Papers will be made on March 27th, to coincide with the upcoming ACS meeting.

We hope to engage the global nanoscience and nanotechnology community, and to encourage the exchange of ideas between physical scientists, life scientists, engineers and other researchers who are active at the frontiers of this diverse and multidisciplinary field. As chemistry is a central science in this field, I hope that chemists will be eager to contribute to Nature Nanotechnology.

I will be attending the upcoming ACS meeting, so feel free to track me down at one of the many nano sessions or through Nature’s booth at the exposition. I look forward to many small-minded discussions!

So, fact or fiction? Hype or hope? What does nanotechnology mean to you?

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

In 2002, Sinninghe Damste et al. showed that two anaerobic ammonium-oxidizing (anammox) bacteria contained a series of unusual lipids that had up to five linearly fused cyclobutane moieties with cis ring junctions (please also see the News & Views piece by Edward DeLong). These bacteria convert nitrite and ammonia into nitrogen gas in an organelle-like structure called the anammoxosome.

These unusual lipids had staircase-like structures, so the authors named these compounds "ladderanes." They proposed that the presence of these fatty acids turned the anammoxosome membrane into "a tight barrier against diffusion," which they postulated was necessary to "maintain concentration gradients during the exceptionally slow anammox metabolism and to protect the remainder of the ce