I spent last week-end at the 9th Tateshina Conference on Organic Chemistry in Nagano, a couple of hours east of Tokyo on the train (from which I enjoyed a superb view of Mt Fuji on the way back).

This meeting is the Asian sister of the EUCHEM Conference on Stereochemistry, better known as the ‘Bürgenstock Conference’. At a time when there are many – and varied – conferences, these two adopt a very particular format (you can read our editorial on ‘meeting matters’ here, no subscription is required but you need a nature.com account).

Limited to around 60-70 invited participants, mostly from Japan, China, Singapore and Korea, the Tateshina Conference is designed to favour communication. Delegates gather in a secluded location (rendered particularly beautiful by the autumn leaves) for 48 hours, with about half a day left free so that they can engage in scientific chats, or make the most of the venue, or combine both. A large chunk of time is devoted to dialogue: a 25 minute presentation is followed by at least 15 minutes of discussion – rather than the mere 5 minutes allocated in most meetings – leading to some lively exchanges. And, this isn’t chemistry-related but I cannot not mention that we were treated to a fantastic clavichord recital, including a guest appearance from our chairman, Eiichi Nakamura, for a clavichord-flute ensemble.

This all contributed to a unique atmosphere — but I won’t tell you about the science because in order to encourage open and stimulating communication, it is agreed that any information presented isn’t for public use. Judging from the wide range of topics discussed I can reveal, however, that many areas of chemistry come under the umbrella of organic chemistry.

Anne

Anne Pichon (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Anne Pichon at 03:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Konnichiwa from sunny Tokyo!

As Neil wrote here last week I just moved to Tokyo at the week-end, pretty much at the same time as our first issue going live. Exciting times! This week has been really busy, mainly with flat-hunting, and I'm now looking forward to applying for my official alien card. Actually I was expecting lots of immigration-related forms but so far I've been so well looked after that I haven't had much bureaucracy to deal with (which can only be a good thing seeing as I can only just write my name in Japanese).

I had intended to spend my first week-end here attending the Annual Meeting of the Chemical Society of Japan, but it turns out the vast majority of the talks are in Japanese (I had thought the plenary lectures, or perhaps the CSJ award lectures, would be in English). I know nearly all the attendees are Japanese, and so it is understandable — but on the other hand would the conference not benefit from being accessible to everyone (including those few non-Japanese invited speakers)?

I will be at the English-speaking events: the Asian International Symposium on Sunday afternoon, and the conference dinner... and I shall now also spend some of the week-end looking for these cherry blossoms everyone is talking about!

Anne


Anne Pichon (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Anne Pichon at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cross-posted from here

There are two clear front runners in Russian state TV’s ‘greatest Russian’ contest. So far Josef Stalin and Tsar Nicholas II are way ahead in the poll, which is being decided by that arbiter of our age: online voting.

But what about Russia’s great scientists? How are they faring? It is quite impressive how many scientists have actually made the voting shortlist.

Cosmonaut and first man in space Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin is currently in tenth place with 96,000 votes. Although far behind the 280,000-odd of the two leaders this still puts him ahead of Boris Yeltsin.

Slightly further down in 14 with 81,000 is Mikhail Lomonosov, scientist and the man who gave his name to that troublesome ridge in the Arctic. Nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov is in 18th place with 38,000 votes and aeronautics expert Konstantin Tsiolkovsky polls 13,000, putting him in 28th place.

Not so popular is the great chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table. He’s stuck down in 33rd place with a shockingly paltry 8,000 votes. This is possibly because of the hugely unflattering photograph used, which makes him look like a slightly elderly Rasputin or Alan Moore on a bad day.

Come on chemists! Vote him up! With 4,000 votes we can get him above both Tolstoy and Bulgakov...

Daniel Cressey

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 09:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Almost every chemist has used mass spectrometry at some point at some point in his or her scientific life, but did you know about all of its cool applications in the study of proteomics? This field has been growing by leaps and bounds as more and more biologists discover the power of mass spectrometry. Check out Nature Methods' special Focus issue on mass spectrometry in proteomics applications.

Allison Doerr (Associate Editor, Nature Methods)

Posted by Allison Doerr at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

One of our featured protocols this month is for the partial reduction of electron-deficient pyrroles under both Birch (Li/NH₃) and ammonia-free (Li/DBB) conditions using the formation of pyrrolines 2, 3 and 5 as examples (for reaction scheme click here). Pyrroles 2 and 5 have recently been published by Donohoe et al. as key intermediates in the of the biologically active natural products 1-epiaustraline, hyacinthacine A119and omuralide (also known as lactacystin -lactone).

Besides being an excellent protocol with beautiful photographs of reactions in progress, it is the first of our Nature Protocols to have associated with it two Network Protocols. These are for the preparation of the starting materials 1 and 4, namely the N-Boc pyrrole 2,5-methyl diester and the N-Boc pyrrole 2-ethyl ester.

Our Protocols Network has two components: protocols, such as these, that are uploaded by users (or suppliers); and comments that can be made both on the open access and the peer-reviewed content. If you would also like to participate, by uploading your favourite method or suggesting modifications to those that have already been published, you could follow the links from our homepage. A Guide to Authors for the Protocols Network also contains more information about this part of our content.

Bronwen (Nature Protocols)

References:
1. Donohoe, T.J. et al. Utility of the ammonia-free Birch reduction of electron-deficient pyrroles: total synthesis of the 20S proteasome inhibitor, clasto-lactacystin -lactone. Chem. Eur. J. 11, 4227–4238 (2005).
2. Donohoe, T.J. & Sintim, H.O. A concise total synthesis of ( )-1-epiaustraline. Org. Lett. 6, 2003–2006 (2004).
3. Donohoe, T.J., Sintim, H.O. & Hollinshead, J. A noncarbohydrate based approach to polyhydroxylated pyrrolidizines: total syntheses of the natural products hyacinthacine A1 and 1-epiaustraline. J. Org. Chem. 70, 7297–7304 (2005).
4. Donohoe, T.J., Sintim, H.O., Sisangia, L. & Harling, J.D. An efficient synthesis of lactacystin -lactone. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 43, 2293–2296 (2004).

Posted by Bronwen Dekker at 04:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the August issue of Nature Methods, which just came out on Monday, we have an exciting and decidedly chemistry-based paper from Werner Nau and colleagues at Jacobs University Bremen in Germany (and it even made the cover!). The authors describe a new concept for enzyme assays using a macrocycle as a receptor for a fluorescent dye and for an enzyme product. When the enzyme arrives on the scene and begins converting the substrate (which does not interact with the macrocycle) to product, the product starts displacing the fluorescent dye from the macrocycle, causing a switch-on in fluorescence. Of course, the macrocycle and dye need to be carefully chosen for each application such that the dye is out-competed by the enzyme product, but once a suitable pair is found, it provides a simple and convenient readout for enzyme activity.

Check it out!

Also of interest: a Review on caged compounds and their application in living cells and an Article describing a rapid method for detecting infectious scrapie prion protein.

Posted by Allison Doerr at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A bit of a stretch for a chemistry blog, perhaps, but I couldn’t resist sharing this lovely find. The designer Makoto Tojiki has created some stunning light sculptures with a little bit of science thrown in. Well worth a look if you get a chance as they’re really quite beautiful. Pi is cited to a large number of decimal places along the side of the glowing twisted tapes that make up the sculptures, and he’s called the design ‘Archimedes dream’, apparently because Archimedes was renowned for being a bit of a visionary and ahead of his time.

In some places on the web people are saying that these sculptures are made from organic light-emitting diodes (which is what first attracted my attention). After a closer look, however, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The electroluminescent (EL) tapes appear to be a copper wire threaded through a layer of phosphor, covered in a protective plastic sheath. I’ve never seen them before, though, and I can’t locate more information than that – does anyone know which kind of phosphor is used for them? They tapes are available in a range of colours and I can think of a number of uses for them, though to be fair, most of them involve me doing my own Tony Hart impression and trying to create something artistic out of them.

Vicki

Vicki Cleave (Senior Editor, Nature Materials)

Posted by Victoria Cleave at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

My fellow Cambridge-London commuters; did you work it out? Once you know that it depicts a gene, it’s annoyingly obvious. But despite travelling past it by train about three days per week, I failed to identify the thousands of brightly coloured bars painted on the cycle path next to the rail track near Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s hospital as a nucleotide sequence. It should have been a clue that only four colours are used.

It probably comes from generally not being very biochemistry minded, as a straight-physics editor. Nevertheless, a friend of mine mentioned he had heard about the biology-inspired cycle path artwork and after some quick Googling, the rumour was confirmed; the colourful sequence stands for the BRCA2 gene, implicated in breast cancer and discovered in 1995.

What a good idea to combine scientific topics with railway scenery. After five years of commuting I would welcome more of these puzzles along the rail track to keep me entertained!

Liesbeth

Liesbeth Venema (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A little while ago I read that the French firm J&M Plast, part of the European packaging group Sphere, was turning to potato starch to make a new biodegradable plastic material for bin bags (unsurprisingly called ‘Bioplast’). L’Usine Nouvelle reports on it here - the link is in French but you’ll find an English version on Matthieu Fossoux’s blog. Biodegradable polymers are now widely investigated – starch-based polymers, polylactic acids (PLA) and polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), naturally produced by bacteria, being among the most promising.

Meanwhile, retailers are increasingly switching to a “pay per bag” policy. This has proved to be very effective in the past, with a reduction by 90% in plastic bag consumption in the Republic of Ireland, where customers have been charged per bag since 2002. The Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea has also adopted a similar policy in the UK, and is reporting a massive 95% drop since last June. Ikea is now extending this scheme to the US and all the profits (with a limit of $1,750,000 within 12 months) are to be donated to the non-profit organization American Forests to plant trees and offset carbon dioxide emissions.

While too many shops still routinely give out plastic bags, these reports are certainly encouraging – and the great news is: we can all contribute.

Anne

Anne Pichon (Intern, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery)

Posted by Anne Pichon at 06:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello, fellow readers and bloggers. I'm back from a blogging break and just wanted to share some exciting chemistry-related papers from the March issue of Nature Methods.

From Ruedi Aebersold and colleagues, we have a paper that compares the three most popular enrichment strategies for analyzing the phosphoproteome by mass spectrometry. Using an unbiased approach, they discovered that none of these strategies alone was sufficient for comprehensive analysis of all phosphorylated proteins in the proteome of cells from a fruit fly. Also in the mass spectrometry arena, we have a Perspective from Steven Gygi and Joshua Elias that provides a guide to researchers using the target-decoy database search strategy to increase confidence in peptide identification.

Peter Schultz and company now present a method to genetically incorporate unnatural amino acids into proteins in mammalian cells, which could open up a whole new range of exciting biological experiments in mammalian systems. And finally, we even have some nanotechnology! Michelle Wang and colleagues describe a method to reproducibly fabricate quartz nano-cylinders, and use them to measure DNA twisting in an angular optical trap.

Thanks for reading!

Allison Doerr (Associate Editor, Nature Methods)

Posted by Allison Doerr at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For reasons that will hopefully become clear in the near future, I’ve recently been working on a list of chemistry-oriented papers that have appeared in Nature Materials, and attempting to categorise them into ‘type of chemistry’. You may think that this would be quite simple for a materials journal, and that you could simply lump them all under the ‘materials chemistry’ heading. Sadly (for my workload), not so, and as seems to be the case so often these days in research, most papers fit into several categories at once. Take our paper from last year, for instance, on photocontrolled living polymerisations – clearly of interest to materials chemists, but also relevant for the categories of synthesis and polymer chemistry. Or our paper on redox-controlled permeability of microcapsules – the materials chemistry is of interest here, but the paper has great relevance for biochemists looking at potential drug delivery, too.

All this has reminded me of a discussion meeting I went to last year hosted by the RSC, entitled “Defining materials chemistry”. The meeting brought together many materials chemists and the aim was to pin down exactly where the boundaries of this research area lie. But this seemingly simple remit turned out to be a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. Needless to say, there was plenty of debate, and we ended up questioning whether we could even come up with a perfect definition of ‘materials science’ or what precisely a ‘material’ is in this context. The OED gives quite a good definition of materials science, but doesn’t even try to define ‘materials chemistry’.

The report from the meeting makes interesting reading, although I wouldn’t say we arrived at a definitive answer, so I was wondering if anyone out there had their own definition that might fit the bill? Just putting it into words seems to get harder the more you think about it - though perhaps it's easier to come up with a personal definition than to reach a consensus amongst a group.

Despite the interesting debate, I can't help thinking that for most researchers, the most important definition lies in the research they’re doing, and not the label they are given.

Vicki

Vicki Cleave (Senior Editor, Nature Materials)

Posted by Victoria Cleave at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Catherine’s entry on toys (here) reminded me of clothing and accessories items I had seen earlier. Kyle at Chem Blog has been selling T-shirts, mugs, wall clocks or postal stamps – which are legal in the US and everything. I didn’t even know that was possible, but I just checked and found out that, in several (all?) countries, you can indeed customize stamps.

The folks at YellowIbis also make T-shirts featuring chemical structures. They picked molecules particularly relevant / amusing – so you can let everybody know that you’re cool as *insert menthol structure*, wear a green jumper showing the structure of a “lucky” 18-crown-6-ether for Saint Patrick’s Day, or alternatively you might want to give this T-shirt to a labmate.

In particular, I’d come across the made with molecules jewellery line, representing the actual structure of certain molecules influencing our behaviour (such as neurotransmitters or hormones). In a less obvious way – except for the DNA ones – the design of these items at Sci Wear also refers to chemical substances, each piece containing the actual microscopic picture of a molecule.

Which molecule would you like to wear? Personally – and you might say I’m biased – I can’t decide between the caffeine necklace and the chocolate (theobromine) earrings...

Anne

Anne Pichon (Intern, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery)

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This is my first post...it's all very exciting...so here goes! Has anyone been listening to crusading environmental chemist Jim Lovelock recently?

Bizarrely I fell asleep to his voice on Sunday night then woke up to it again in the morning (on Radio 4 of course). Lovelock strongly believes that nuclear is the only viable energy option for the future, because climate change is ‘past the point of no return’ and renewable energy is underdeveloped. Read a Times review of his latest (and rather pessimistic) book and find out why he says wind farms aren’t green.

Five ways to save the world on BBC2 Monday night presented high tech solutions to climate change. What do people think about these ideas, or about nuclear power for that matter?

Samia

Samia Mantoura (Intern, Nature Physical Sciences)

Posted by Samia Mantoura at 05:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi everyone, this is my first entry so I thought I’d blog about… well, blogging.

Last week I attended a talk by Tony Hey, from Microsoft. He was speaking about e-science and, among other things, talked about CombeChem, an EPSRC project based at the University of Southampton. A small part of the project (see this BBC news article last year) involves replacing the traditional notebook by a digital form. The degree of privacy of the digital lab book could be determined by the user (only themselves? their research group? their university?). Of course the ultimate openness in science is Jean-Claude Bradley’s Open Notebook Science initiative at Drexel University, where he and his group use a wiki as a lab notebook (UsefulChem) and make all their data publicly available. Bill Hooker at 3 Quarks Daily also refers to it in his trilogy about the future of open science, where his posts progress from Open Access to the research literature (here), to the “openness” of data (here), to a fully open practice of science (here).

Nobody can really predict what the future of science will look like. But for now, would you consider blogging about your unsuccessful experiments - those that will never make it into a paper or thesis - to make them available to everyone?

Anne

Anne Pichon (Intern, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery)

Posted by Anne Pichon at 05:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, yet another ACS has come and gone. I leave you with a rainbow of chemistry talks.

"The formation of chromium rich particles by the dissolution of red clays in groundwater monitoring wells." Mysterious chromium in Oklahoma wells found out.

"Identification and characterization of off-flavor aroma impact compounds in canned orange juice"
Canned orange juice's flavor attributes are "tropical fruit, grapefruit, cooked/caramel and medicine." Yum.

"Research on environmental fate of phenanthrene in Lanzhou Reach of Yellow River." Math says the pollutants will be stable in the river sediment in 70,000 hours.

"The Pennsylvania Green fluorophore: A hybrid of Oregon Green and Tokyo Green for the construction of hydrophobic and pH-insensitive molecular probes." The search for the next fluorescent marker. Amazingly, there doesn't seem to be a band called "Tokyo Green."

"Highly efficient fluorene-based UV-blue light-emitting polymers with controlled effective conjugation length." Ah, making things that glow.

"Purple: The dye of dyes" A history lesson with recent archeological findings thrown in. I wish I had seen it.

Posted by Emma Marris at 09:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Polymers and biology, together in perfect harmony. This meeting has intrigued me with a number of sessions about bio-related polymers. Timothy Long's group had two: one about determining which physical properties of polymers make the best vectors for gene therapy, and one about using DNA base pairs to make a polymer with two sets of properties. Heat it to disassociate the base pairs, and you get a flowy substance, cool to clamp them together again, and you've got something strong enough to do something with. Plus, there's bio-inspired dental polymers from Temple University, enzymes in polymers for sensors from Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, and polymers derived from soybean oil, feathers, and rice. Finally, there was a presentation on making better cigarette filters from Salmon sperm, from the Ogata Research Laboratory, Ltd.

The general crush on bio-related polymers seems to stem from their ability to acquire reactive, "smart" properties from their biological components, as well as from the environmental advantages of making stuff from things that aren’t petroleum. Now, can they produce the self-drying jacket from Back to the Future II?

Posted by Emma Marris at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

J.J. La Clair, the controversial chemist (for background, see http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060731/full/442492c.html) in the mutton chop sideburns, gave a talk today to a packed room. It was hot, stuffy, and young in there, as he talked us, mic-less, through what he called "an approach used in a number of labs that I've developed, optimized and made easier to use." As far as I could tell as a layman, the approach had to do with designing synthesis of natural products with florescent labeling and biological tests in mind. I'll leave an evaluation of the technical content to others more synthesis (or biology)-savvy than I. I'll just mention that his first slide talked about his Xenobe Research Institute (which is pronounced "zen-OH-bee"). His slide said that the company was working on 80 studies with academe, industry and government. He must be a pretty busy man.

He acknowledged the contretemps over his claimed synthesis of hexacyclinol—and even included on his acknowledgement page a shot of the T-shirt being sold which memorializes the controversy, saying that he salutes creativity in all forms. And yes, that was my headline on the shirt, but I didn't write it. Reporters very rarely write our own headlines—but we do get to write our own blog post titles. So I decree that the title of this post shall be: "butternut squash soup", since that is what I am eating right now.

Posted by Emma Marris at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

-Our gung-ho enthusiasm for antidepressants mean that there is a certain amount of Prozac in the water these days. Freshwater mussels are less than pleased, though, since Prozac is making them release their larvae before they are viable. Freshwater mussels are sensitive creatures, and 70 percent of the species native to North America are extinct.

-In an irresistible item, a peculiar bird called the Black-Bone Silky Fowl has been found to be packed with carnosine, which has a rep for anti-aging and other positive health effects. The bird is a staple of Chinese medicine, and has soft white feathers over black flesh and bones.

-Check out the brand new Chemical Structure Lookup Service, hosted at NIH,. http://cactus.nci.nih.gov/cgi-bin/lookup/search

-Fucoxanthin, from brown seaweed, is taken up by the fat. It seems to both reduce adipose tissue and turn the fat a bright orange. Anti-obesity clinical trials are in the works.

-Adrienne Kozlowski, retired chemist, and her husband, have taken up hot air ballooning as a hobby. They say it is a perfect diversion for chemists, because manipulating the balloon is all a matter of mastering the laminar flow of the air.

-Peter Murray Rust, of Cambridge, on the future of Chemical information: "We are going to start mashing, and it is going to amaze the world."

Posted by Emma Marris at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I went to a talk on by UCSB's Robert Vestberg, on "Synthesis of hydrogels with well defined network structure using Click chemistry", because I have been hearing this buzzword floating around – "click chemistry"—and I wanted to figure out what it was.

But first, hydrogels. Hydrogels are polymers all cross-linked together and stuffed with water. They can be useful in medicine, for example, as soft contact lenses. They are biocompatible, key molecules can diffuse through them, and they are tough. Often the crosslinks are induced by a blast of radiation—like UV light, for example.

Vestberg and his colleagues are using "click chemistry" to do their linking. The click concept was described quickly as a reaction catalyzed by copper (I) that seems to be a one-size-fits-all room temp process that organizes your molecules into a regular structure. Functional groups can be knitted right in.

At least that was the impression I got. The meeting room in the Marriot was next to some sort of noisy kitchen or workroom, and it was hard to concentrate. It sounded like they were banging the lumps out of large cookie sheets on the other side of the wall. The "backing up" beep of some kind of vehicle was also intermittently heard.

Anyway, the hydrogels are made in little Teflon molds. You can make them with other fluids besides water, too. "We've done it in crappy Australian wine that I got from my boss," says Vestberg, who is pleased with his gels, which can be stretched to 1500% their original length before they break, much more than UV crosslinked hydrogels.

After the talk, I did some reading on click chemistry, which was invented by Barry Sharpless. It seems like a kind of Lego chemistry to me. You may be interested to know that searching the program of abstracts for this meeting with the term "click" yields 42 hits.

Posted by Emma Marris at 01:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This meeting has it all. Today I caught a wonderful presentation by Frank Lee of Nanchang University about efforts to introduce “Good Agriculture Practice” or GAP (See the FAO’s page on this approach here), on the growing of herbs for traditional medicines. The idea is to make sure the medicines are what they purport to be, are not chock-full of mercury or other toxins, and are being harvested in a sustainable way.

So, field labs have been set up in Inner Mongolia to work of the harvesting of licorice there—used as a medicine to “invigorate the heart, lungs, spleen and stomach,” among other thing. The most interesting challenge they face is supervising the transition from collecting wild plants to growing them as a crop. They are watching to make sure that the domestication process does not affect expression of the active component. Awesome.

Posted by Emma Marris at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The hype-heavy world of haute cuisine has recently been rolling its tongue over the phrase “molecular gastronomy”, said to be practiced by such chefs célèbres as Pierre Gagnaire and Ferran Adrià. The trend is for innovative foods, and new ingredients. Shrimp treated with protein-knitting enzymes, so it can be coaxed into noodle shape, glass-like spheres of isomalt, filled with the smoke from roasting mushrooms, flavored foam.

But On Food and Cooking author Harold McGee, in a session this morning, opined that the term should be ditched. He noted that most chefs labeled as molecular gastronomists rejected the label and say that their experiments rarely take place on the molecular level. Apparently, the phrase came from a workshop about the science of cooking, held in Sicilly in the early 1990s—but the workshop was, according to McGee, was all about the chemical underpinnings of traditional cuisine, and has nothing to do with the Julia Child-meets-Dale Chihuly creations of the new cooking.

These chefs aren’t looking into molecules, says McGee, “they are cooking with ingredients. They are artists, not chemists.”

That said, there are some firm links between the new daring cooks and chemistry. Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal questioned the age-old custom of removing the jelly and seeds from tomatoes before cooking with them. To his palate, they were tastier than the flesh. He worked with Don Mottram of the University of Reading to see why, and they found that the jelly has tons more glutamic acid—the source of the famous meaty, nummy umami flavor (See http://www.nature.com/news/2003/030707/full/030707-3.html)--than the flesh.

So, special note to my boyfriend: I now have scientific proof that de-seeding tomatoes is silly.

Posted by Emma Marris at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I bet $100 that this is the first ACS meeting where a session has featured a slide of Jesus Christ with an erection.

Yes, you guessed it, it is the presidential session celebrating Carl Djerassi: chemist, novelist, and playwright. He was a top chemist for many years, specializing in synthesis of marine natural products, and collecting awards like pogs. Then, late in his career, he turned to literature. Lately, plays have been his thing, and at the end of the laudatory session, there was a reading of selections from his play "Phallacy". He played the character Prof. Rex Stolzfuss. But it was in a scene where a young art historian chats with a young chemist about the representations of Christ's genitals in art that the image, an engraving from the 1520s called “Man of Sorrows”, according to the online text of the play, appeared. Alas, no amount of googling can summon up an image, but rest easy, Jesus is clothed…but showing.

I am no theater critic, so I won’t say anything more about the play. I will say, though, as a feminist, it is fun to see the man who first synthesized progesterone—which led to the birth control pill.

Posted by Emma Marris at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Went to some sessions on hydrogen storage (you know, so that cars can run around emitting just clean, pure water vapor, and so that we can enter the "hydrogen economy") today and was introduced to ammonia borate by Bill Tumas of Los Alamos. I liked him, because he kept telling us "the hard cold facts". I've heard people talk about the "cold hard facts," but somehow, the "hard cold facts" seem even more bitterly inevitable. One of these was that no one has found a solution to storing hydrogen. The other is that his favorite candidate—ammonia borate—is not going to slot neatly into the current infrastructure.

The stuff may be good at holding onto hydrogen until you want to go vroom, and then letting it go, and it has a glimmer of a hope of getting the hydrogen compact enough so that one can drive 300 miles on a full cell—the standard measure of success—but it isn't possible to just shoot more hydrogen into it when it's gone "dry". So in this version of the hydrogen economy, one would buy a fuel cell, drive until it was used up, then return it to the fuel station for a full one. The old one would have to go back to the plant for some more complex chemical treatments. For some reason, everyone seems to think that this makes the technology completely impractical, but I don't see why. Everyone used to return their empty milk bottles when they picked up a full one. Maybe we can even take a page from the golden age of dairy and hire fuelmen, who will take the empty fuel cells from your front porch and leave full ones. They can even wear those swell hats.

Well, I suppose we ought to work out whether ammonia borate will even work before we start designing uniforms. In the meantime, I suggest Tumas get his own show on cable news called "The Hard Cold Facts with Bill Tumas."

Posted by Emma Marris at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The conference gets underway even before my plane lands. A fellow from a microscopy concern is leaning across the aisle chatting to a chemist about his latest model. In the airport shuttle to downtown, chemists wedge inside the van, their poster tubes making the whole process seems like some complex protein folding problem. And today the streets of downtown San Francisco are alive with chemists--teeming with badged hordes looking for a cup of coffee between sessions.

The ACS meeting is big. It has strong points and weak points, but most of all, it is big. This year sees the innovation of satellite registration desks in hotels throughout downtown, and a mind-boggling number of papers—almost 10,000. And I am going to "cover" the meeting. Ha ha ha.

Catherine Goodman, below, says she ends up more or less walking the poster sessions as her fancy takes her. This is perhaps the perfect way to approach a meeting of this size—both posters and talks. Why see all the talks in your own field, when half of it will be old news? Why not stab a pin into the program or just amble into any old session? I pledge to spin the wheel of fate at least once this time—stay tuned for some chemical Kismet.

Posted by Emma Marris at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As the conference winds down, I think it was, all in all, a good thing. It will be interesting to see how it develops. Will it become a mega-meeting, like the ACS meetings, or will it find some sort of niche, disciplinary or otherwise?

It was quite windy for most of the week, with the main plenary tent creaking and popping like a schooner in full sail. I thought about making some corny pun about these being the winds of change sweeping over Europe, as they find their collective identity and become a force to reckon with. This would have been just too pat though, and in any case, we will have to wait and see.

And so, Viszontlátásra from Budapest!

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A big conference just isn't a big conference without a lot of handing out of medals. So here's congrats to Jonathan Nitschke of the University of Geneva, for winning the European Young Chemist's award. He got an IOU from the Italian Chemical Society for 1,800 €, and a nice gold medal. Lee Cronin promised me that if he didn't win, he would get up and shout 'It's rigged! It's rigged!', but unfortunately, he got one of the silver medals, and so we didn't get to see a temper tantrum in the tent.

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Analytical chemists won't run out of work any time soon. The world is reassuringly full of unknowns. Perhaps less reassuring is the nature of some of these unknowns. Koni Grob at the Kantonales Laboratory in Zurich, which he calls 'a nano FDA', has been looking at the compounds that food packages shed into the food we eat. His most recent focus has been on the plastic gaskets found inside jar lids. He finds that when oil–like that in tomato sauce, for example-touches these gaskets, all sorts of known and unknown things leach out into the food.

'Many people want to have bio or organic food, but I think that they are not aware that by far the highest source of contamination is food packaging.' Many compounds, like epoxidized soybean oil and Bisphenol-A diglycidyl ether are present in oily jarred foods in levels far exceeding the maximums for contamination at the plant. And there are hundreds or thousands of other things in there that he has found with gas chromatography but not yet identified.

However, there is no need to ditch all your tasty oily foods in a panic. Grob is clear that this is a challenge for analysts, not a worry for consumers. In fact, he's ambivalent about getting media coverage of his project. 'Our philosophy is to inform those really involved and not the consumers, he says. 'It is the authorities that have to do a lot more about this.'

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- Kosuke Yoshida of Tokai University in Shizuoka, Japan has found a marine microalga, with the handsome name Nannochloropsis oculata, that can be trained to chop the noxious chemical formaldehyde into relatively benign ethyl formate. Yoshida is interested in using the trained strain to mitigate formaldehyde used to control parasites that live on fish gills in aquaculture.

- Hungarian Chemistry celeb George Olah was here yesterday, promoting his new book, Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy. He chatted with invitees just a few yards from where he is immortalized on a plaque listing Hungarian Nobel prize winners.

- A chat in the hotel bar with a fellow attendee reveals to ignorant old me that there is such a thing as Philosophy of Chemistry, and that it’s main journal is elegantly named Hyle, after the ancient Greek for “matter”. Further investigation reveals that Nature regular Phil Ball has a paper in the latest edition examining attitudes towards chemists in recent American fiction. The rest of the issue, all about the public image of chemistry is also very interesting. Awesome.

- Mobile phones might be bad for you, especially if your head is a vat of solution of lactoperoxidase, according to Roberta de Carolis of the University of Rome.

- Broccoli sprouts have more glucosinolates—a precursor to cancer-preventing Isothiocyanates—than full grown broccoli.

- The Seine is filled with caffeine and pain relievers.

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Su Doku, the number game that is sweeping the world, has been adapted by the Royal Society of Chemistry into a puzzle where each square must have only one of nine elements listed at the bottom of the page. The play is exactly the same as the digit version, except that one contemplates the likes of lanthanum and cerium while one plays. Check it out at www.rsc.org/puzzle.

Posted by Emma Marris at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The big tent where we saw the folk dancers was packed this morning for Jean Marie Lehn's plenary on self-organizing systems. I heard lots of ebullient murmuring on the way out, so I think it went well, though some of it may have been the celebrity-induced glow of those who have just heard a Nobel laureate speak.

The general idea is that if one works hard, one can find molecules that when introduced, get along and immediately start building complex structures on their own. Lehn showed us grids and other cunning structures that had been got up by molecules that recognized each other and then bound predictably.

Much of his work was on those superstructures bound together with metal ions, so that one way to look at his grids was a field of regularly spaced metal ions, potentially useful as a computer chip. So these "supramolecules" are, he said, "a powerful alternative to nanofabrication. Don't make components, design them to make themselves."

He also showed how mixed soups of molecules will segregate themselves into structural units—so you'll have a bunch of double helixes forming alongside a bunch of triple helixes. This relies on recognition, and then selection of the appropriate molecule to fraternize with. In a challenging finale, Lehn wondered if this effect might not represent a kind of "chemical Darwinism."

His other quoteable moment: "Chemistry is the science of informed matter".

Posted by Emma Marris at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I heart food chemistry, and for more than one reason. First of all, it is easy to get into the science when you can immediately relate it to cheese or grapes or Parma ham or something nummy like that. And secondly, it demonstrates how seriously we take the pleasure of eating. Much of food chemistry is concerned with ensuring that when we decide to spend an evening eating bon bons and drinking champagne in the bath our chocolate is not adulterated with inferior cocoa butter fat equivalents and our champagne is actually from Champagne.

Elke Anklam, of the European Community Joint Research Centre in Belgium, gave a nice overview of food authentication this morning, which revealed that despite being armed with electronic noses, chromatography of various kinds, spectroscopy ditto., natural isotope fractioning, and PCR, they still can't easily tell if olive oil is being cut with hazelnut oil…"even if you can taste it."

Ha ha! So the best and least scientific means of authentication is still the human tongue. That being said, I was recently informed that most people cannot tell red wine from white with their eyes shut. Incredulous, I put it to the test. I shut my eyes and had my companions at dinner hand me glasses. I called the first red, the second white, and, taking a cue from the snickering I heard, the third a mixture of the two. Turns out it was the same glass of red wine all three times. Oh!

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's programme is chock full of environmental chemistry, including a few sessions on pharmaceuticals in the environment. In the last few decades chemistry has given us more and better drugs, and we have not been shy about taking them. One graph of pharmaceutical consumption in France from 1970 to the present was hair-raisingly steep. All those drugs that aren't broken down by our bodies are, well, let's be scientific here, excreted and enter the waste-treatment stream. Some end up in rivers and lakes.

So it is good that chemists are busy inventing new tools to understand the scope of the problem and what it's implications might be—beyond trout blissed out on Prozac or crustaceans with the caffeine shakes.

Outside the environmental session room, a poster by Mei-Fang Chou and colleagues from Tri Service General Hospital in Taipei, Taiwan, gives me pause. They've managed to tweak the non-speedy alertness enhancer and mood brightener modafinil (sold as Provigil) so that it also is an anti-inflamatory pain reliever. Holey moley—what a blockbuster that could be. A cure for pain, sleepiness and unhappiness in one drug. Look out fish.

Posted by Emma Marris at 09:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mark Peplow, former Nature staffer, and current editor of the Royal Societyof Chemistry's Chemistry World is here in Buda, and he's recording his impressions on a brand new soft-launched blog, which is available here: http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw.

Posted by Emma Marris at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, the reception was delightful. The food was excellent and the wine got good reviews. But before the eating and drinking came the speeches by chemistry worthies from across the continent. Generally, they were short and expressed pleasure in European chemistry coming together in this conference, and in the umbrella organization, EuCheMS. The MS on the end stands for "molecular science," and is part of a decided emphasis on the molecule which seems to me to be a bit of an attempt to grab more territory for the field.

More inside...

Continue reading "European Chemistry Congress: the reception" »

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Jó napot kívánok from Budapest, where the European chemistry community has decided to get together in the first ever European Chemistry Congress. The scale of the thing is impressive for it being a first: 2,500 registrants from 65 countries and an abstracts book the size of a phone book (do they still make those?).

Before the official start, I sat down with organizer Gábor Náray-Szabó, and asked him the obvious question: is this conference a challenge to the American Chemical Society meeting, that twice-annual mass migration of chemists?

Click below to read on...

Continue reading "European Chemistry Congress: Jó napot kívánok" »

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[JF - Bronwen Dekker, an Assistant Editor for Nature Protocols has asked me to post this.]

Nature Protocols is a new online journal for the presentation of both new and old methods in a step-by-step/recipe format. Packed full of useful information in the form of CRITICAL STEPs, CAUTIONs and TROUBLESHOOTING tables, these protocols should be a valuable resource for bench researchers. There are two submission routes: protocols that have been commissioned, peer-reviewed and edited will be published in the 'Nature Protocols' section and non peer-reviewed material can be posted as 'Network Protocols.' The content of Nature Protocols will be free until the end of July, but the Network Protocols will always be freely available.

While most of the content at present is geared toward the biological sciences, we think that this will also become a useful resource for synthetic and analytical chemists as it could be a forum where labs can post their methods thus sharing valuable information on how to perform syntheses or analyses of specific classes of compounds. In the moderated commenting facility, other researchers will be able to suggest modifications to the published steps that improve results in their hands. Other functionality includes links to key information, such as articles where the procedure has been used previously and information about relevant reagents and equipment.

Current content includes methods for analyzing proteins using mass spectrometry (for example, for quantifying changes in the abundance of specific proteins by in-gel isotope labeling - Asara et al.), radiolabeling protocols (for example, labeling proteins with indium-111 and yttrium-90 - Cooper et al.), and the synthesis of reagents (for example, the preparation and use of azido ruthenium, a new photoreactive probe for investigating calcium-binding proteins - Israelson et al.).

Bronwen

Bronwen Dekker (Assistant Editor, Nature Protocols)

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As if New Yorkers like myself didn’t already have enough to worry about, the local news last week helpfully informed us of another threat: the potential for a major hurricane to hit New York City.

Most scientists believe that increased emissions of greenhouse gases have contributed heavily to global warming, which has in turn been responsible for the increase in the number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes. Hurricanes do not usually hit states above North Carolina with great force because the ocean temperature must be at least 80°F (27°C) for a hurricane to maintain its destructive momentum. But with global warming causing an increase of ocean temperatures worldwide, the potential for a major hurricane to reach New York and other coastal areas in the northeast is growing.

I looked up a few facts and figures, which unfortunately seemed to confirm the news report.

After Miami and New Orleans, New York is considered the third most likely city for a major hurricane disaster (and of course we all remember what happened to Miami and New Orleans in 2005!).

The United States Landfalling Hurricane Project reports that there is an approximately 26% chance that New York City or Long Island will be hit with a Category 3+ hurricane in the next 50 years.

If a Category 3 hurricane hits NYC, the storm surge will flood the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel and cause extensive flooding of the subways.

The NYC Office of Emergency Management has posted maps of hurricane evacuation zones for all of the New York boroughs. I was somewhat dismayed to find that my apartment in Brooklyn is in the green zone, which means it is in trouble if a Category 3 ever heads my way (luckily, I live on the third floor of a four-story house). However, the NPG office is in even more danger in the yellow zone in Manhattan, meaning that it is at risk from a Category 2 storm surge!

Allison Doerr (Assistant Editor, Nature Methods)

Posted by Allison Doerr at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Welcome to “The Sceptical Chymist,” a new blog from the editors of Nature and the Research journals.

We hope that you will help us fill this blog with stimulating discussions of all things chemical… This isn’t the first blog at Nature: there’s also the “Nature Newsblog,” “Free Association” (a blog from the editors of Nature Genetics), and “Action Potential” (a blog from the editors of Nature Neuroscience). But this is our first blog in the chemical sciences and we hope that you’ll help us make it a successful one!

So, what will you find in this blog? Here’s a (partial) list of what we plan on discussing:

- Meetings we’re attending, including the upcoming 2006 Spring meeting of the American Chemical Society

- Chemistry and biochemistry papers published in Nature journals and elsewhere

- Chemistry and chemists in the news, including scientific and popular press coverage, important policy developments, new initiatives in chemistry, etc.

- Upcoming conferences, newly published books about chemistry, and interesting websites we’ve found

- And anything else you’d like to talk about...

Now if you made it this far, you’re probably wondering why we named our blog “The Sceptical Chymist.” Well, it all has to do with a book written in 1661 by Robert Boyle, who is best known for Boyle’s law, and for co-founding the Royal Society on November 28th, 1660.

In 1661, Boyle published “The Sceptical Chymist,” in which he “argued against Aristotle's view of the four elements of earth, air, fire and water” and instead “argued that matter was composed of corpuscles which themselves were differently built up of different configurations of primary particles.”

Boyle criticized alchemists, calling them ”vulgar” and “inferior," and “appealed to chemists to experiment and … pleaded that chemistry cease being subservient to medicine or to alchemy, but rise to the status of a science.” Furthermore, he “advocated a rigorous approach to scientific experiment [and] believed all theories must be proved experimentally before being regarded as true.”

So it’s not surprising that Boyle has been called the “founder of modern chemistry” as well as the “father of chemistry.” We named this blog “The Sceptical Chymist” to pay homage to Boyle and the dramatic metamorphosis that took place after the publication of this book. By no means do we think that this blog will be a 21st century equivalent of this seminal text, but we hope that – like the original book – this blog will engage the chemical community, ask important questions, and make a positive impact on the field.

We will be adding entries regularly, 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

Chat with you soon!

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)
Terry Sheppard (Chief Editor, Nature Chemical Biology)
Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)
Allison Doerr (Assistant Editor, Nature Methods)

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