Nature Chemistry | The Sceptical Chymist

NChem Research Highlights: superconductivity, protein folding and cross-coupling

Time for our next trio of research highlights

It might not have escaped your notice that some people have made a new family of high-Tc superconductors…here’s a piece about the 43 K samarium one. Of course, this field is moving terrifying quickly at the moment, so I’m sure my story’s out of date by now! The physics pre-print server ArXiv for this area is about as up to date as you’re going to get.

Proteins that have unfolded, or folded up the wrong way, are responsible for some pretty nasty diseases (Alzheimer’s, CJD), so being able to re-fold them to more or less their original state would be quite handy – this one’s about gold nanoparticles used to that effect.

All you synthetic organic chemistry junkies out there will no doubt be big fans of the Suzuki-Miyaura coupling already, but have you thought about trying it with simple aryl methyl ethers? These guys have…

And finally, here’s a link that will make you very glad you’re a chemist. The headline says it all: Zombie caterpillars controlled by voodoo wasps. There’s even a movie for the iron-stomached among you.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Comments

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    Catherine said:

    Ugh! That movie was delightful/horrifying. One more reason I’m glad I’m not a caterpillar.

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    Retread said:

    It’s a very nice story, that aggregates of misfolded proteins cause neurologic disease — the senile plaque and the neurofibrillary tangle cause neuronal dysfunction and death in Alzheimer’s, the Lewy body (composed mostly of alpha-synuclein) in dopamine containing neurons causes Parkinsonism, superoxide dismutase aggregates cause motorneuron degneration in familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. E.g. the aggregates are the smoking gun causing disease.

    This is extremely simplistic thinking (but has been characteristic of the field until recently). One can regard an abnormal structure seen on a microscope slide in at least two other ways — (1) as a pile of spent bullets, used by the cell to defend itself (2) as a tombstone — part of the dying process of the neuron, but unrelated to the cause of death.

    The evidence for the smoking gun theory in all 3 diseases mentioned is at best controversial. Morever there is evidence for (1) — see below. So efforts to find small molecules to break up the aggregates (which is ongoing) might be successful but ineffectual therapeutically or actually harmful.

    See [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 104 pp. 3591 – 3596 ‘07 ] for the protective effects of the neurofibrillary tangle in Alzheimer’s disease.

    See [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 101 pp. 17510 – 17515 ’04 ] for the protective effects of the Lewy body in (an animal model of) Parkinsonism.

    See [ Cell vol. 104 p. 586 ’01 ] for the protective effect of axonal spheroids in motor neuron disease.

    See [ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 105 pp. 7206 – 7211 ’08 ] for the protective effects of amyloid formation (but in the rather removed yeast prion system).

    There’s a lot more coming out but this should give you an idea.

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    psi*psi said:

    Why should that make us glad to be chemists? Parasitic wasps rock my world! They’re so cute and dainty.

    (Yeah, I know I’m in the minority here, I used to work for an entomologist.)