The last day of an ACS meeting is weird. Lots of people have gone already, so the cavernous convention center starts to feel a bit empty. On top of that, everywhere you look people are dismantling all the conference stands, pulling up the carpet, and, for some reason, wrapping up displays in cling-film. It reminded me of a restaurant I went to once, where I was trying to finish my dessert but the waiters were putting their coats on and turning off the lights.

It's been a great trip, but I'm ready to go home. My abiding memories will be:

An analytical speaker, who claimed that he loved mass spectrometry, then peppered his talk with phrases like "Mass spectrometry tells lies" and "Mass spectrometry data is like having a map of hell".

Another guy describing an assay with fruitflies, in which he described the fruitfiles that couldn't learn to avoid electric shocks as 'Republicans'.

The lady who spiced up her talk by showing a picture of herself dressed as a salt cellar, with a large strawberry on her head. (There was a very good reason for this, but there's not enough space here to explain.)

So, farewell to Boston - here's hoping, like Katherine, that British Airways have some functional planes. Oh, and can the last person to leave the convention center please remember to turn the lights off?

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

That's it, I'm off. I've had a great week, as ever the conference didn't fail to surprise, impress (and exasperate). All good ingredients for a productive few days. I assume the delegates were equally as productive. We'll find out in New Orleans in March, I suppose.

Hopefully I'll make it home on time - please British Airways... I am anticipating a huge welcoming committee.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 03:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Even though there are reportedly 14,000 people at this meeting, I'm always amazed at how small the chemistry community can be. I've bumped into lots of my ex-colleagues from when I was in industry, and they all have different stories to tell.

Some of these people are working in the pharmaceutical industry, which is having a tough time at the moment. There's a lot of anxiety about jobs, which seems particularly cruel given that some of these people have only just recovered from being made redundant elsewhere.

Still, big pharma seems to be doing a lot better than agrochemistry. A friend of mine who used to work in that area says that there are very few agrochemistry R&D presentations at this meeting, which basically reflects the state of the industry. Genetically modified crops and lower price margins have taken their toll, and the industry seems to be in real decline.

Finally, some thoughts from a process chemist. He comments that there seems to be no appreciation of environmental concerns in most of the lectures that he's seen. Green chemistry is a noble thing, but he says that the simplest way of helping the environment would be to phase out certain solvents - such as dichloromethane or benzene. At least one big pharma company will be doing this in the next few years. My friend believes that the top academic chemists should set an example by using more environment-friendly solvents, but they rarely do.

What do you think? Do the big name chemists have a responsibility to be green?

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's the last day of the conference, a sleepy atmosphere pervades the air. Or at least my head, which has up until now been filled with worms - but you'll have to pick up a copy of Nature next week to find out why I might be investigating worms at a chemistry conference. The suspense is unbearable, I know...

I saw some talks on antibiotics today. Resistance to antibiotics has one good thing going for it, that's for sure - chemists and biochemists are always going to be in a job. Talking to Gerry Wright after his talk really brought this home - we might find a way to beat drug-resistant bacteria, but the bugs are constantly beavering away working out ways to beat us back in return.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There was a new session in the medicinal chemistry session today, called Hot topics in medicinal chemistry. I spoke to the session organiser, Jeff Zablocki, about the motivation for the session - he wanted to get industrial parties to come and talk about new results. This wasn't easy, he said, but he managed to pull together a session with five different companies come and talk about early results for five different drugs.

One of the talks was by Thais Sielecki, from Cytokine PharmaSciences. She was showing us new preclinical data for a type of molecule based on small molecule inhibitors of macrophage inhibitory factor, MIFs. Her impressive data showed that their orally-delivered drug could halt MS symptoms in mice, and actually show improvements in some symptoms. Sielecki told me that for a small company like Cytokine PharmSciences, a chance to present data like this is great for getting business partners. Of course there was a large chunk of data - such as the structure of the actual product - that she didn't show, but I noticed lots of furious scribbling going on in the room anyway.

It's always going to be hard to get pharma companies to disclose information, but Jim McCarthy, programme chair for the Med Chem division is planning to encourage more openness - with the introduction of a session at the next meeting for companies to make first announcements about clinical compounds in medicinal chemistry. And take up has been good so far he says. But he knows that there will never be any disclosure of new target molecules. "This is industry" he says. Intellectual property rights will always keep peoples' mouths clamped tightly shut.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 08:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This week has driven me slightly insane, for a number of reasons. Included in those reasons is the vastness of the conference. We all say it, year in, year out and I've been trying to bite my lip. But really, ACS - can we have a conference that doesn't involve half-hour bus trips between venues?

Now that's off my chest let me tell you about ionic-liquid marbles. I saw some incredibly cool videos of droplets of ionic liquid being rolled in PTFE powder, and then forming marbles which are very hydrophobic and have amazing floaty properties on water surfaces. The work is being conducted by Tom McCarthy and Lichao Gao at the University of Massachusetts.

Some of the marbles they made were magnetic and could be dragged around - with potential for drug delivery. The coating of the marbles is held in place by magic. Well, actually, it is held in place by electrostatic forces (but I thought I'd inject a bit of children's storybook fantasy into this post), and this means that when an electrostatically-charged rod - rubbed on a pair of nylon trousers or something like that - is brought near the marbles, they pop! And in drug delivery this could mean them being dragged to a target using the magnet, and then being allowed to release their bounty with the stroke of a charged wand...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 02:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, I popped along to hear Roald Hoffmann (again) talking at his own birthday symposium. Also there was author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, who is not a chemist, but when I met him this morning was wearing a very natty periodic table t-shirt. It was in colour, much better than my white-on-red version. Note to self - update wardrobe.

Back to the facts. Roald Hoffmann got a Nobel prize for some very clever theoretical chemistry and some rules that explain, and can be used to predict, why and how reactions proceed. But his first published paper was actually on the thermochemistry of cement. Fascinating.

Oliver Sacks has not only a periodic table t-shirt, but he told me that for the past 60 years has carried a periodic table in his wallet as well. I don't think it has been the same one all that time, because it was in very good condition. And haven't they added umpteen elements in the past 60 years.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Quick, hurry over to booth 434 in the exhibition hall, you still have 42 minutes to get your entry in to win an iPod so that you can listen to the Nature chemistry podcast... Hurry! The draw will be made at 11 AM.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As much as I've enjoyed my forays into analytical and flavour chemistry, yesterday afternoon I had a relapse and attended the Arthur C. Cope session on organic chemistry in the cathedral-sized ballroom. Actually, the cathedral analogy doesn't seem a bad one, as sometimes it does feel as if there's a certain amount of worshipping going on.

I really enjoyed this session because it had an ecelectic mix of topics. Highlights for me included Kenneth Shea's talk on how to build polyethylene molecules from single-carbon units, in a living polymerization reaction involving ylides and diazoalkanes. In this way, he's made some unusual polymers - such as chains with high steric congestion that can't be prepared using traditional methods for polyolefin preparation.

I also liked Leonard MacGillivray's presentation on solid-phase organic reactions. He co-crystallizes pairs of organic compounds to form lattices in which hydrogen-bonding aligns the molecules in a perfect orientation for reaction - specifically, photodimerization reactions between alkenes to form cyclobutanes. Because the lattice holds the molecules in very specific orientations, the stereochemistry of the process is precisely controlled.

But my favourites were Dave Macmillan and Andre Charette. Charette described his work on the preparation of chiral amines by adding organozinc reagents to N-phosphinoylimines. Now I've always been a bit dubious about dialkylzinc compounds, because they're a pain to make. But Charette has thought of this, and has developed a relatively simple way to make them from zinc methoxide - so top marks for thinking of the practicalities.

MacMillan discussed his work on SOMO-activation reactions using organocatalysis. I liked the way that he gave much of the credit for this idea to his co-worker, Teresa Beeson. His group are currently developing new reactions using SOMO-activation, so expect to see enantioselective alpha-halogenation of aldehydes, vinylation reactions, and the enentioselective alkylation of cyclic ketones (which apparently requires a completely different catalyst to the one currently published).

All in all it was a top session. The only down-side was the way that people in the audience would get up and leave as soon as the speaker they were interested in had finished. I know that people have to focus on lectures in their own fields to get the most out of these meetings, but if they'd stuck around for the whole session I think they'd have found the variety of topics refreshing and stimulating.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Like Catherine, I'm a bit behind on scientific posts - so here's a quick recap of some of the talks I attended earlier in the week.

My Sunday morning started with an excellent session on malaria/anti-malarials - Solomon Nwaka from the World Health Organization's Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases 'kicked off' the session with a broad overview that really drove home why malaria is (still) such an important disease: every 30 seconds a child dies from malaria, and the disease is responsible for more that one million deaths each year. Anti-malarial drug resistance is a huge problem (and there aren't that many new drug candidates in the pipeline), so the session focused on several academic scientists who are searching for new drug candidates. This is often done as a collaboration with Medicines for Malaria Venture, a non-profit organization created to “discover, develop and deliver new antimalarial drugs through public-private partnerships.” (For more information on public-private partnerships, click here and here).

I was only able to stay for the first half of the session, but I heard Jonathan Vennerstrom talk about synthetic peroxide anti-malarials (including this simplified analog of artemisinin) and Paul O'Neill talk about analogs of amodiaquine that were active against drug-resistant strains of malaria (click here for a recent review on 4-aminoquinoline anti-malarials).

The debate about whether or not academic scientists should try to get involved in drug discovery can get quite heated (see Derek Lowe's take on it here; you might also be interested in this NRDD 'Outlook'). Though I understand why some scientists think that academics should avoid this area of research, many pharmaceutical companies aren't willing (or able) to pursue a drug discovery program that focuses on malaria or other important, yet neglected, infectious diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries. (NITD and GSK are important exceptions to this general rule...)

So my question is if many pharmaceutical companies aren't willing/able to tackle these problems, why shouldn't academic groups give it a try?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a bit of gossip - Avogadro's constant, the one that lets you work out how much is in a mole of something, is under threat from a bunch of physicists who want to see it declassified as an absolute number, and instead tied to Planck's constant, which is altogether more complicated to explain but essentially is used in quantum mechanics to bunch things into packets, or quanta. Not very clearly explained, but I'm no physicist. Check out other definitions here and here.

The person who told me this shocking piece of news is a member of the ACS nomenclature committee. Before you all rush out and try to recalculate the number of moles in your morning coffee - don't panic. My source tells me that on a practical day to day basis, there will be no change, although explaining moles to a tenth-grader will be more difficult if the change ever makes it through.

The paper that started it all was apparently published in the journal Metrologia, by Ian Mills, although I'm having trouble tracking down the paper.

From my brief conversation, it seems that the idea is to relate Avogadro's number to Planck's constant so that the number becomes a relationship between the two numbers rather than an exact number. The grandiose phrase I heard was that this would relate Avogadro's number to the invariants of nature. What would happen in your world if suddenly you had to redefine Avogadro's number? Anything? Nothing?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the great things about ACS meetings is the incredible breadth of topics that are covered. In my quest to learn about branches of chemistry that are unfamiliar to me, this morning I attended a session of the division of agricutural and food chemistry. To be precise, the lectures were all about interactions between taste and smell.

I've always been intrigued by flavour chemistry, and the way that the body senses chemicals and interprets them as smells and tastes. So this session was a real eye-opener. I have to say that there wasn't much that you could really describe as chemistry - not a chemical structure in sight, in fact. But here are some interesting factoids that you might be interested in.

First off, have you ever stopped to think about why some smells seem sweet or sour, when sweet and sour are tastes? Its all to do with associations in the brain. The associations become so hard-wired that if you smell something like strawberry while you're eating something sweet, then the taste becomes sweeter. And if you smell caramel while you're eating something bitter, the taste seems less bitter. Perhaps most remarkably, sweet smells can even improve your tolerance to pain.

The attention you pay to a taste can also affect your enjoyment of that taste - the more you try to analyse a flavour, the less you enjoy it. Which suggests that professional wine tasters enjoy wine less than joe public. And one final thought - if all this is true, then coffee will smell different depending on whether or not you use sugar. Speaking of which, it's time for my latest caffeine fix...

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continuing my proud tradition of not blogging in real time at ACS meetings, here are my memories of a lovely Sunday:

I went to my first ever session in the chemical toxicology division, which was a session on zebrafish organized by Peter Dedon. Knowing a bit about his background (in DNA structure/damage/etc), it was quite a surprise to find Dr. Dedon bringing this group of people together; it turns out that the simple explanation is: scientific curiousity. How delightful.

Leonard Zon gave the first talk about using zebrafish as a model system for stem cells, some of which (that prostaglandins increase the number of stem cells in bone marrow) was recently published. In some of his new work, he's discovered a pre-cancer phenotype (a cell cluster) as well as a molecule that can reverse the clustering. As comes as no surprise, we didn't get to see the structure of the molecule.

Patricia McGrath* gave a very informative talk about zebrafish in general, and outlined some of the ways that her company can monitor what these fish are up to for screening applications. She also gave out plastic fish, to the delight of everyone except the people who arrived too late to get them. There was also randomly a plastic fish sitting next to me - hard to know whether it was there just to get information, or perhaps to protest animal testing? In any case, it made for a good neighbor.

John Stegeman gave a great talk which highlighted the importance of carefully thinking through your biological model system: he's found that there are significant differences in the cytochrome P450's in zebrafish vs. humans; this is important because these Cyp450's are the enzymes that process drugs and other foreign molecules, meaning that bioavailability and identity of any metabolites could be quite variable.

The final speaker, Jackie Lees, closed out the session by discussing cancer in fish.( Who knew??) She's discovered an interesting correlation between cancerous cells, the presence or absence of p53, and ribosomal proteins. While their initial theory was that the ribosome was just not producing p53, it seems there may be more complicated mechanisms at work.

Overall, it was a really good session. And fish (plastic or otherwise, except for the ones with electrodes in their heads) are cute.

In other chemical toxicology news, Joanne Kotz (the senior editor at Nature Chemical Biology) has organized a session in the same division on Thursday morning, focused on understanding the full scope of what drugs do, including intended and unintended interactions. If any of you are still around that day, check it out!

Finally, I need your help: I was walking out of the convention center, and passed a room labeled 'CHED - DUCK'. I glanced in and all I could see was people eating ice cream. Can anyone explain?

Catherine Goodman (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

* I can't seem to find a website for either Dr. McGrath or Phylonics, the company. However, I was amused to discover that if I just searched for 'McGrath', this website was the first result. Coincidence? Or a convenient way to get rid of the test subjects?...

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have just worked out that, since saturday afternoon, all my meals have been sandwiches for one reason or another, although I almost ate a slice of cold pizza at one point, but didn't want cheese-related nightmares so declined. I have broken the cycle now thanks to a chocolate croissant in the press room.

My mind turns to food because a major thread of this conference is the genomics of obesity. In particular I was interested to learn that human adenovirus-36, known to be the "obesity virus", has now been shown to turn stem cells into fat cells. Magdalena Pasarica at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and Nikhil Dhurandhar from Louisiana State university, took stem cells from the fatty tissue from a bunch of liposuction patients. Half of the batch of stem cells were exposed to Ad-36, and half not. The virus-infected stem cells developed into fat cells.

So does this mean, as long as I don't get the virus, that I can happily eat my chocolate croissants without worry of becoming obese? Or am I missing the point?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I only have time for a quick post, but I wanted to mention a few other blogs/bloggers that are at the fall ACS meeting - most of you know that Paul and Kyle are here, but it looks like journalists from C&EN and Chemistry World are blogging from the meeting (including Carmen Drahl, who used to post at She Blinded Me with Science/who now works for C&EN...)

It also looks like Mitch (from Chemical Forums) and Eric (from Homebrew and Chemistry) are here too... Have I missed anyone? If so, please add a link to their (or your) blog in the 'comments' section of this post...

It sounds like some of these bloggers will be at John Harvard’s Brew House in Harvard Square tomorrow night. I'll try to swing by for a round (and will see if I can convince any of the other NPG editors to join me) - hope to see you there...

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ah, the poster session. I like these things; they have allowed me to perfect that useful social skill of marching up to strangers, thrusting a hand out in the hope it will be shaken, and saying "Hi, I'm Katharine. Who are you?" Once in a while the tactic pays off and you learn something incredibly interesting.

Tonight's session was slightly marred, not for the first time, by the realisation that members of the press had not been issued with drinks tickets. I had experienced this at the previous ACS meeting so should have anticipated it. Instead i had to charm one of the posterees into donating one of his tickets. In return i got to learn about rotaxanes that can be stacked up to make switchable liquid crystals, in a very elegant piece of chemistry. This is the first controlled, switchable liquid crystal to be made, and no surprise that the work, done by Ivan Aprahamian (thanks for the beer Ivan) comes out of the lab of Fraser Stoddart. The work was recently published.

The poster also had a molecular carousel - an incredibly complicated molecular machine with three "axes" joined at top and bottom each holding a ring that can move up and down, independently of the other rings. Hard to describe, but a carousel, where the rings represent the galloping horses, is a good analogy.

My favourite title of the evening has to be "highly absorbing superabsorbent polymers" by Thilini Mudiyanselage, from Bowling Green State University. These are hydrogels that can absorb thousands of times their own dry weight in liquid. The lightly cross-linked 3-D polymer nets expand a lot after soaking up all that water.

As usual, a huge mix of chemistry was showcased at the poster session - from a system that gets rid of bird poo, to a poster called "Girls in science" - bet you can't guess what that was about - and try saying it without using a Muppet-esque "Pigs in Space" voice...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm an organic chemist at heart, but for this meeting I've decided to explore beyond the wonders of total synthesis. So this morning, I attended one of the analytical chemistry sessions - and it was fascinating.

I opted for a session on metabolomics. For those of you who think this sounds like a rude word, let me tell you that it's the study of metabolites as markers for disease (or at least that's one application; it's impossible to do justice to the full range of possibilities in one blog entry).

The session began with a talk by Lily Tong, from Greg Stephanopoulous' lab. They were able to identify metabolites that are upregulated in patients that die of kidney failure. In this way, they were able to devise an accurate model to predict patients at most risk from the disease. Impressive stuff.

Rima Kaddurah-Daouk described a study of plasma taken from people with schizophrenia, and showed that each of three commonly-used antipsychotic drugs produces its own pattern of lipid-metabolite perturbation. This provides further evidence of the so-called 'lipid hypothesis' of schizophrenia, which suggests that the disease is not just caused by disturbances to neurotransmitters.

And finally, the award for gross presentation of the day goes to Andy Ewing, who is using fruitflies as models to study the effects of alcohol intoxication and dependence. This involves harvesting fruitflies' heads, and we were treated to some lovely pictures of his special fruitfly-head masher in action.

It's been a while since I looked at how metabolomics is progressing, and I was impressed at how far the field has come over the last few years. And now that I know fruitflies get drunk, I'll never look at them the same way again.

Andy

Andy Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 05:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently wrote a feature about storing hydrogen gas in incredibly porous materials (shameless bit of self promotion there, but one needs to keep the fans happy). But now I'm wondering whether I got it all wrong - a talk today by Bob Crabtree raised an interesting point - the motoring industry has an infrastructure that is all set up to revolve around liquid fuels, so why go after hydrogen as a fuel if one keeps it in the gaseous state?

Crabtree has a strategy to store hydrogen as a liquid, by using organic liquids that have readily-releasable hydrogen. In this case he has studied, both experimentally and computationally, nitrogen-containing cyclic molecules. The amount of nitrogen present can be changed so that the temperature at which hydrogen can be released is also changeable. There is much to say on this topic, I feel... but for now I must run - the monster-sized poster session is happening this evening and I'm hoping for a bit of excitement.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think I've just encountered the highlight of my visit - a poetry reading by Nobel prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann.

Coincidentally, I've been thinking a lot about poetry lately, and how a poet can convey their thoughts. I am not brave enough to attempt to write anything other than a jaunty limerick myself, so I have a good deal of admiration for anyone who can convey a complex thought in an abstract, but senseful way.

And Hoffmann just spent an hour in the middle of a busy, bustling exhibition hall, packed full of people trying to sell mass spectrometers and the like, with a crowd of people captivated by his poems that cross from hard-core science to his childhood experience growing up in Poland during the war, to more philosphical matters. Check out the next issue of Nature's chemistry podcast, when it hits your ears in a few weeks to hear more.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.

This Douglas Adams quote was one of the first things that popped into my head when I entered the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. Simply put, the building is huge: "516,000 square feet of contiguous exhibit space" with "3 exhibition halls each ranging in size from 162,000 to 184,000 square feet."

After looking at the floorplan, I realized that it would be pretty tough to rapidly hop from session to session - the convention center has two skybridges that you need to use if you're moving from the west side of the building to the east side of the building, so it can take 10 to 15 minutes to get from one session to another. This must be why the refrigerator in the press office was packed full of bottles of Gatorade/Powerade...

The first day of the ACS was great (more about the science in my next post), but I've yet to find a good place to grab coffee that doesn't have a huge line at all hours of the day - on my way to the afternoon session I saw people crowded around a table containing snacks and coffee. Alas, the giant drum of coffee was decaf! I saw another table further down the corridor, but it too contained only decaf coffee. Oh cruel world, why must you mock me so?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, here I am , gathering news for Nature. Like Andy, I had a less-than smooth arrival, after being unceremoniously bumped off my flight last night. But here I am, a day late and raring to go.

I'll be blogging mainly on the news@nature.com site, so check back to get the latest from the conference floor...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

People often say to me that travelling must be one of the perks of the job, but, oh boy, there are times when I beg to differ. I tried so hard to check-in online, but the British Airways system kept chucking me out. So I tried to use the electronic check-in kiosks at Heathrow airport, but after queuing for 30 minutes, the machine refused to give me a boarding pass. I was told to join a nearby queue for the actual check-in desks, where I waited for an hour, before being told that, actually, it was the wrong queue.

When I eventually got my boarding pass, I then had to stand in front of an x-ray machine in security, striking different poses (turn to the left, hands in the air, turn to the right, hands down...) I know security is important in these troubled times, but I couldn't help thinking that they were just making me dance the Timewarp in slow motion, and taking pictures of me in my underwear with their x-ray camera. I imagine the images will be on YouTube by now.

The plane was late, and once we'd boarded, we were told we'd have to wait for an hour for a take-off slot. Eventually we trundled to the runway, whereupon the plane immediately turned around and went back to the gate, because a passenger had taken ill. The stricken passenger was removed, and we had to wait for his luggage to be located in the hold and removed. Then the plane had to be re-fuelled, and we waited for another take-off slot. After three hours on the plane, we finally took off.

It could have been worse; some of my friends from the Royal Society of Chemistry had their flight to Boston cancelled. And at least I didn't have to watch any films about penguins this time.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest - on with the ACS meeting...

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, the fall ACS meeting is nearly here - a few NPG editors will be attending the meeting (including myself), so don't forget to check back for daily updates...

I also wanted to mention that we've put together another special issue of Nature that will be distributed at the meeting - in this week's issue, there's a News Feature on metal-organic frameworks and several papers:

- Structure-based activity prediction for an enzyme of unknown function by Hermann et al. (click here for the News & Views)
- Vitrification of a monatomic metallic liquid by Bhat et al. (click here for the News & Views)
- A transglutaminase homologue as a condensation catalyst in antibiotic assembly lines by Fortin et al. (click here for the News & Views)
- Selection and evolution of enzymes from a partially randomized non-catalytic scaffold by Seelig & Szostak (click here for the News & Views)

If you're going to be at the meeting, don't forget to swing by the NPG booth (booth #434) to pick up free issues of Nature, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Nature Nanotechnology, and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

And last (but certainly not least), Paul thinks we should meet for "[d]rinks or dinner at a neutral location" - depending on where and when it is, I'll try to swing by (and bring along a few of the other editors...) Hope to see you there!

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 03:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not sure whether this technically counts as an ACS-related post, because I wasn't actually at the conference this day. But, I was at the University of Chicago, which would have been unlikely if I hadn't already been in Chicago for the meeting. And, this blog may be a bit rambling, which is due to the fact that I left my brain in Chicago, so it all comes together...

One extra fun thing about visiting the campus relates to some family history: my grandfather wanted to be a chemist, and actually spent some time as a graduate student at the University of Chicago before dropping out due to lack of funds. It was very interesting to think of what the campus must have looked like when he was there, or what he might have worked on. It also brings to mind some comments that I've heard in passing over the last couple of years; to sum up, it's the idea that scientific results only have to age by a certain amount before people forget about them, attempt the same (or almost the same) experiments again, and publish them as new information. Perhaps some poor graduate student will get their Ph.D. by figuring out what the length of time 'x' is that governs this phenomenon (and then the next poor student will write up the same report 'x' years later, and so on, and so on...)

While I was treated to some fascinating stories by Jun Yin, Chuan He, Sergey Kozmin, Joe Piccirilli, and David Lilley (who was also there visiting), what I most want to discuss here is the interesting lunch I had. Dr. Kozmin took me over to the faculty club, and specifically to the 'chemistry table.' Not surprisingly, perhaps, this consisted of a long table (~20-25 seats) where chemistry professors came and ate lunch, with later arrivals sitting further down the table, and so on, and so on. While I'm sure most departmental topics were curbed by my presence, there was lots of general discussion and just a sense of familiarity. On the way back to the chemistry department, I was chatting with Dr. Kozmin and our lunchtime neighbor, Robert Haselkorn, about this practice, and they both indicated that these lunches are a great way to discuss anything related to departmental affairs, and that in the end, the chemistry faculty don't need to have very many official faculty meetings because everything gets sorted out at lunch (or, perhaps, that issues that are raised in formal meetings but have been previously discussed rise from the ashes of the lunchtime conversations, much like their own beloved mascot?). I think this is a lovely idea, as it provides an opportunity to discuss things in a more casual way, and with less of a time limit (although I guess it's possible that if you don't go to lunch, you miss out on the decision-making).

I'm all for casual and comfortable discussions. Do you all know of other examples where faculty (or industrial teams, or similar) get together in a similar way? Do you wish that there were more opportunities like this, or do you like more formal meetings where everything's on the record? Or at least can you recommend some good faculty clubs? After all, I've got visits to plan...

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 06:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The extra challenge (for me and other chemical biologists or biological chemists or what have you) of the spring ACS meeting is that the biological section basically closes down. This year, the entire program was 5 sessions, which were actually all sponsored by another division. So while, at the fall meeting, it's quite easy to scoot around between enzymes, folding, imaging, etc. within a few pages of the printed program, the spring meeting requires some extra work to find sessions dealing with biologically-related questions.

Don't fret, though - the scientists who want to talk about these things are still a part of the meeting, and can be discovered in nooks and crannies of the other divisions. Kind of like how rampaging dinosaurs will figure out a way to overcome their female-only DNA to take over the world. Or, to imagine a different definition of that infamous line (in my blog title, you know), perhaps I mean that us Nature editors will still be able to locate these hidden sessions.

That last idea was certainly true for a great program put on by the CHED division, focused on 'Exploring and Exploiting Nature with Biomimetics'. Not only was this program part of an unusual division,* but it was set in a room in the basement of the North/South building at the end of a hall and around a corner, etc. Too bad there wasn't also a wardrobe to climb through to reach this magical land of graduate student-invited talks. I didn't get to see as many of the talks in these three sessions as I would have liked, but they were full of the heavy hitters in the field, including, for example: Ron Breslow, Julius Rebek, Larry Que Jr., Paul Wender, Laura Kiessling, Dirk Trauner... the list goes on and on. Wender gave a nice talk about function-oriented synthesis, in which the complexity of natural products is pared down to the minimum functionality required. In addition to simplifying the synthesis of these molecules, he suggests that we can use this process to better understand the function of the molecule, allowing the design of new (and even simpler) compounds. Eric Kool, on the other hand, is all about making things more complex. He is designing an orthogonal genetic system based on xDNA (expanded DNA, in which each base contains an extra ring). Once that works, maybe we can design some xDinosaurs?

Anyway, congrats to the graduate students for putting together such a great lineup. And now, I've mixed up enough pop culture references for one day.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

* To be fair, the sessions were cosponsored by the Biological division, so I didn't have to look that hard.

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I've never been one to follow the trend, so I decided to write about the ACS after it was actually over. Forget this real-time blogging stuff! (and if you're only reading this blog for the ACS content, keep reading for the next few days).

I wanted to offer my congratulations to Drs. Puglisi and Williamson for putting together a great series on the Biophysics of RNA. I went to 2 different sessions (both were outstanding), and the remaining sessions were always high on the list of the 5 concurrent sessions I wanted to go to. On Tuesday afternoon, I caught Dan Herschlag's talk, who "wants to set forth principles and physical organic parameters to make RNA folding less mysterious." And indeed, his talk was a great tour through different forces and conditions that need to be considered in elucidating RNA folding. He was also very gracious when I went up after the talk and asked, basically, "can you explain your whole field to me during the coffee break?" In fact, he and the other speakers I cornered got me pretty interested in the topic, so if I ever leave my current job you may find me back at the bench in an RNA lab.

Aside from just being nice people in general, the RNA crowd made a nice counterpoint to the person who found my phone and promptly downloaded nearly $300 worth of games (and as you can imagine, it wasn't in an attempt to spruce it up for me before giving it back...). I guess I'm learning to appreciate all those silly contraptions people have for keeping their phone nearby, as my track record with phones and the ACS isn't so great...

Well, here's hoping the next ACS organizers keep up the good work, or at least that I stop losing things...

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

So the ACS conference is no more. Actually, it feels like it's been winding down since Tuesday, what with all the big banners saying "See you at the next meeting", the posters advertising taxi services to the airport, and people wandering around with their luggage. I think it's a shame that so many people have already gone home by the last day, especially for those who are still presenting. They may not be the biggest names, but it doesn't seem fair that their potential audience is reduced before they even start.

As I mentioned before, this was my first ACS, and I think it's lived up to expectations. I've enjoyed the chemistry (of course) but also the people watching. It seems that more senior chemists are predisposed towards facial hair (especially splendid moustaches), whereas the younger crowd are rebelling by generally being clean-shaved (although a trendy goatee beard is permitted).

Technology now allows for some mind-blowing multi-media presentations, but also inevitably to a random scattering of pop-up error messages. Still, I've enjoyed some of the visual humour. My favourite was the speaker who, when discussing the various organisms that have had their genomes sequenced, provided an image of each species. There was a picture of fruit-fly, a worm, and a chimpanzee. And right next to the chimp, representing humanity, there was George Bush. Say no more.

Anyway, I'll be flying back home tomorrow (oh joy, another 8 hour flight with nothing to do but watch films about penguins. Why is it always penguins?), and then I'm going to lie down in a darkened room for a week. Really.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Things are winding down here. I just went along to the session on cold fusion (read the story here), but my expert timing meant that I arrived just in time for the break. Nevermind, I was treated to an advance showing of one of the talks yesterday. I have to admit, I was skeptical, but this is pretty cool stuff. As Frank Gordon, one of the cold fusion scientists said to me, "this actually looks like real science" - and he's right.

In spite of all the disdain that the field is treated with, the cold fusion people I met were all very positive cheerful people, all completely convinced by their research and with what look like compelling arguments. Even the programme chair for this session (not a cold fusion scientist) told me that he was impressed by the results being presented. He's keeping an open mind on the matter. That's quite a way for the field to come since it was laughed almost out of existence in 1989. Gordon was keen to tell me that since they have been quietly plugging away at their work they have not come under attack in the same way Pons and Fleischmann did. "The silence has been deafening" he said.

Cold fusion? I don't know, but the evidence that something weird is happening is there. Maybe it's time to think about this again...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello y'all. Apologies for the lack of posts today, I've been immersed in the world of cold fusion - more of which tomorrow. As such I haven't been to any sessions, which is disappointing, and the conference is almost over - it's certainly winding down. Apparently the ACS bigwigs are already back at home. But the conference still has one day to run. It's going to be quite eerie in the cavernous conference venue if the exodus continues at present rates. More tomorrow....

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Tuesday in Chicago didn't get off to a great start...

I thought I would start my day off with a trip down memory lane and head to the symposium - "30 Years of Conducting Polymers" - the first session of which began with a memorial of Alan MacDiarmid, who passed away in February (the obituary published in Nature can be found here - subscription required).

Well, it turns out that memory lane was a little congested - I turned up at 9:15 to hear the first talk and couldn't even get into the room, people were standing in the corridor watching the talk through the doors! (Note to ACS conference organizers: a memorial session for a recently deceased and well-liked Nobel Laureate, especially one that features a co-recipient of the aforementioned Nobel Prize, should not be held in a room only slightly larger than one of the bathrooms onboard a Boeing 777 jet... - more on this later...)

Deterred, I went a little further down the polymer path and ended up in a talk given by Al Nelson, a former UCLA colleague of mine, and now researcher at IBM Almaden. Al was talking about polymeric self-assembly and molecular recognition, and he gets props for the best 'Moore's Law' kind of slide I've seen in a while... he based it on gaming systems, showing how their capabilities have progressed at a phenomenal rate - from marbles, through to Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Having bravely explored the wilds of inorganic chemistry, I decided to meander back to the more familiar territory of organic synthesis, by way of some organometallic chemistry. Braving the overly effective air-conditioning, I shivered through a terrific session in honour of David Milstein. I enjoyed listening to Ilan Marek, who gave a beautifully clear account of some pretty hardcore asymmetric organic synthesis, involving lots of zinc, copper and lithium species. Milstein himself gave a historical overview of his work, including his cool stuff on carbon-carbon bond activation.

But my favourite speaker was Bob Bergman, who wowed the crowd with his latest research on reactions mediated by nanovessels (or cavitands). I love this work - Nature covered some of it in a News & Views article by Julius Rebek last year. Bergman described unpublished results showing that uncharged organic bases (tertiary amines) are actually trapped by cavitands as protonated ammonium cations. This means that acid-catalysed reactions can be perfomed in basic solution! Very nice indeed. Don't forget that we have a News & Views feature article on C-H activation by Bergman in the March 22nd issue of Nature.

It was, all in all, a brilliant day, which ended with that traditional conference activity, a long night in the bar. As a result I'm now feeling a bit like a run-down battery, but that's also traditional after a few days. Time to stoke myself up with coffee, I think...

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature).

Posted by amitchinson at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There was a chance for us to "meet George Whitesides" today. It was a great idea - like a book signing by some celebrity chef or something. Having never met the great man myself I pottered over to the exhibition room and was amused by the long line of people queuing to get their special issue of Chemical and Engineering News signed.

(For those of you who don't know who Whitesides is - he's a professor at Harvard who has the widest ranging research areas I know of - and is doing some interesting work in the chemistry of the origins of life. He's a hero to many young chemists)

I decided not to join the queue, as it didn't seem like I was going to get a chance to really meet the man himself other than to say "Hello, I'm Katharine, from Nature". Still, I hope everyone else was happy. Whitesides himself seemed to be enjoying himself. I even saw one fan who'd had his shirt signed. Has chemistry just gone rock and roll? Yeehah.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My background is in organic chemistry, but the great thing about a meeting like this is that I can learn new things. So yesterday, I decided to explore the strange (to me) world of inorganic chemistry. Frankly, I had no idea what I would discover. I half expected the inorganic attendees to fall silent when I walked into the room, staring at me with hostile eyes, before announcing "We don't like organic chemists in these parts". I think the jetlag is making me paranoid.

But no, it was all cool and I saw some great stuff. Naively, I would never have expected to see an enzyme crystal structure outside of a drug discovery seminar. But then I discovered bioinorganic chemistry, and there were active sites everywhere. John Lipscomb and Steve Lippard gave some cracking talks about the metal species found in enzymes, such as Rieske dioxygenases and bacterial multicomponent monooxgenases. These proteins can be thought of as the original C-H activation specialists. On a similar vein, Thomas Rauchfuss is doing some amazing chemistry to model the active site of hydrogenases.

What I really liked about these sessions was that the lecture rooms were smaller (it was standing room only for Lippard's talk), and the debate was lively. Every talk inspired interesting discussion, and I was impressed by the spirit of academic engagement, which I hadn't really encountered elsewhere. So, if you're sticking closely to your own areas, why not go foraging in foreign territory? You might like what you find.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello again - just to remind you that I am posting more over at the Nature Newsblog - do take a look...

The Sci Mix poster session last night was hot, sweaty, and yet again underground with no natural light. I think I'm going to turn into a mole. And what's this? Free beer at the poster session? Hooray. But there was a catch - you needed tokens, and my humble press registration didn't include any. Thankfully the look of horror on my face when I realised this prompted the nice man standing behind me in the queue to donate one of his tokens. Thanks very much.

The session had some interesting posters - here's a brief run down of my faves.... (oh, and watch out for a news story on the news@nature site later on one of them)

"was Boltzmann wrong?" screamed one poster. Well, I couldn't quite remember what Boltzmann had done apart from have a constant named after him, and the details of that were hazy. Wikipedia tells me it's the physical constant that relates temperature to energy. So was he wrong? No, it turns out, he just didn't have to consider nanoscale properties.

Another poster was looking at using titanium dioxide to neutralise astronaut's waste. And I don't mean their used teabags. Yuck. But I suppose they can't all wear nappies all the time.

There was a great poster that detailed how barnacles can be kept off ship's hulls - but I will let you check back later to read a news piece about that...

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Though Lake Michigan is quite beautiful, it's pretty tough to appreciate the view when you're in the back of a stalled bus in the middle of Lakeshore Drive. Luckily, it only took 15 minutes for a replacement bus to arrive...

Despite this minor setback, I made it to the conference center in time to see most of the symposium in honor of Dave Evans. Evans talked about a few recent total syntheses from his group, including Oasomycin A, which was recently completed (see also these two papers). He's a great speaker who really holds your attention for the whole talk: he only discusses the most interesting reactions/transformations (and not every single step of the synthesis) and he uses some color (but not too much) to draw your attention to key atoms and/or newly formed bonds.

Later on in the afternoon, I made my way over to see Regan Thomson's talk on his recent synthesis of (+)-symbioimine. I really enjoyed his talk - I've known Regan for years and it's always exciting to see people you know publish interesting work... But the chair of the session really didn't bring her 'A' game today - she had trouble pronouncing his name (calling him 'Dr. Thomas' twice), fumbled through the word 'osteoclastogenesis,' and completely mis-pronounced the name of the molecule. OK - I agree that 'osteoclastogenesis' isn't a very common word, but I think it's pretty important to get the names of the people in your session correct. (Maybe I'm just overly sensitive about names, as so many people have trouble pronouncing mine...)

Well I'm bushed and it's not even 10 PM - it's amazing how exhausted you can get by running around from session to session... For those of you who are here in Chicago, how's your meeting going? What session/talk/event has been the most enjoyable for you? What are you looking forward to seeing tomorrow?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 09:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

I turned my back on academia a few years ago, but I still like to think I have a modicum of intelligence... So why, in my hotel does the non-dairy creamer have a note on it that says "contains milk"? huh?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, That's amore..."
So sang Dean Martin. What's a pizza pie? I often wondered. Now I know - cos I've just had some - it's just a pizza with a massive crust, and miraculously by the power of chemistry that very crust was pumping me full of antioxidants.

Yes, the life of a journalist is a tough one. Here in the ACS press room we are given free pizza. Hooray. But of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The pizza was to highlight graduate student Jeffery Moore's research at the University of Maryland. He has tinkered with baking conditions and fermentation processes in dough and shown that longer baking times and higher temperatures lead to more antioxidants forming in the dough.

And that is the very dough they fed us. It might make up for the lack of natural light here in the journalist's cave - surely being outside in the sun and all that vitamin D would be better for us than a pile of greasy pizza - antioxidants or not?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I wouldn't normally go to the health and safety talks, but this one struck a personal chord with me. "Explosion in a refrigerator results in college laboratory fire". Hey, it could happen to anyone. Really, I didn't know that the fridge hadn't been made chemistry-safe. Really, IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE....

... Anyway, on with the story. Lawrence Stephens is professor of natural sciences at Elmira College (apparently the first college to offer degrees to women that were equivalent to men's degrees).

Larry had high hopes for one of his students to crack a particularly tricky chemical synthesis, and was thrilled that said student wanted to do extra work over Thanksgiving. When that student asked if he could leave his solution in the fridge as a final attempt for it to crystalise, Larry said "sure".

It turns out that there was a miscommunication about which fridge was to be used, and the student popped his solution (2 litres of pentane) into a normal fridge in the basic science lab - which also had hydrogen peroxide in it. And the door was firmly closed for 3 days or so. This resulted in a major explosion that gutted the undergrad teaching lab (on a positive note, a brand new and very swanky new lab was built as a replacement).

Now for that personal chime I felt. During my PhD a similar - almost identical thing happened to me. The fridge in my lab - unbeknownst to me - had not been modified so had working electrics inside that cause low flash-point solvents to spark. Oops. My lovely dichloromethane solution never did give me the nice crystals I wanted. But I guess, like Larry, I did get a new lab. (sorry Brian).

As Larry put it, there is a lesson to be learned "we shouldn't have household refrigerators in our labs". Wise words indeed.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday was a good day for talks, and first up on my talk schedule was the symposium in honour of Ben Feringa, who has been awarded the James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry. Ben wrote the review article on molecular machines that we published in the first issue of Nature Nanotechnology (you can see it here – free access) and it’s always a pleasure to see him talk.

Colin Nuckolls got the session off to a great start with his talk about molecular electronics, where he puts molecules between two carbon nanotube electrodes and then does all sorts of fancy stuff with them... pH switches, metal-ion gating, photoswitching, biosensing... Next up was Takuzo Aida, who wins the award for snazziest (that is a word, right?) PowerPoint so far – treating us to movie after movie describing his light-driven molecular machines.

Dennis Dougherty was next, reminding us that nature has been making molecular machines for a lot longer than we have – and so is an awful lot better at it that us. Josh did a write-up of this talk in an earlier post (see here), but I wanted to comment on the fantastic delivery, especially the dead-pan definition of what a structure-function relationship is... and then pointing out that we would have probably figured it out eventually! Recalling all the debate (in the blogosphere at least) about last year’s chemistry Nobel prize, it was interesting to hear Dougherty say that, “crystallography is physics”.

And then, Ben rounded out the session with his talk about molecular machines and motors. I also caught up with him later at the RSC reception and, with a little arm-twisting, he has agreed to do a ‘Reactions’ piece for the blog (well, he can’t say ‘no’ now, can he?).

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chicago. Good for steak, deep-dish pizza and baseball curses (unless you are a White Sox fan). Not so good, however, for ACS meetings.

With the exception of one of the Hyatts, the hotels are a loooooooong way from the convention centre. To be fair, the bus service has been good, and I haven’t had to wait more than a few minutes to get on one. Once you get dropped off, however, the session you are interested in could be a day’s hike away – as for all of you multidisciplinary types out there who fancy some PMSE one minute and some ORGN the next, forget it.

Finding the press room was also a challenge – I was very conscientious, printing out the e-mail that I received before the meeting, telling me exactly where to find it... it’s just a shame that the room number I was given just had a passing resemblance to the actual press room... what’s a couple of digits between friends?

Lunch is another matter. As Ben Davis remarked yesterday as he sped off in the opposite direction in search of a sandwich; 11,000 delegates, 4 restaurants - the maths just doesn’t work. We were a relatively quick moving Starbuck’s queue away from having fudge for lunch... yes, there is a fudge shop in the convention centre, so it’s not all that bad.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello from Chicago!

I'm one of the editors attending the ACS, and arrived in Chicago last night. Actually, late last night, since my plane (and Josh Finkelstein's - check out his post for more details on our flight crew) was 2 hours late. But, this turned out to be extremely important, because it allowed me to 1) have time to read the entire current issue of Nature and 2) see some additional experiments that are going on right here in Chicago firsthand. What am I talking about, you may ask? Let me explain (and let me also offer the disclaimer that I last took physics in 1997, so be nice):

One of the news items in this issue of Nature discusses Newton's second law. In this piece, we learn that Alexander Ignatiev is trying to prove the existence of modified newtonian dynamics by observing whether a small piece of the world (literally, two spots at the north and south poles a few centimeters across) moves in the absence of external force. This is quite difficult because normally everything on the earth is moving due to the movement of the planet. While there are a multitude of challenges to overcome, it seems that Ignatiev is excited about the prospect.

So excited, perhaps, that it seems local Chicago folk have picked up on his enthusiasm. In particular, last night I was looking for some dinner and found a place that would give me a burger to go. After I finally got the enormously oversized bag, I was ready to head back to the hotel through the restaurant's revolving door. Unfortunately, as I stepped into the space, apparently someone else on the other side was one moment ahead of me, and started pushing on the door before I could get all the way in. Once she saw me (and noticed that my hand, holding the burger bag, was close to being forever separated from the rest of me), she stopped her forward motion briefly, allowing me to think that I could at least get my hand and said bag out of the door before both were pulverized. Then, while I was still obviously fumbling to get the elephantine bag out of the door, she apparently noticed a unique opportunity to test Newton's first law, which states:

An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force. An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force.

Upon this realization that she could actually be the first to demonstrate modified newtonian dynamics, she started pushing on her part of the revolving door again, no doubt expecting that the object at rest (the door on my side) would somehow stay at rest, even given the external and very unbalanced force being applied to it.

Alas, Newton wins again. And I ended up with burger salad.

But thanks, Chicago, for inviting me to take part in your scientific pursuits. I look forward to more scintillating experiments during the rest of the conference.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a confession to make - this is my first time. Even though I've been to conferences all over the world, somehow I've never made it to a national ACS meeting, until now. For the benefit of newbies everywhere, here are my first impressions.

This is certainly the largest conference that I've ever tackled, and the choice can be confusing. My pre-planning involved checking out the schedule online, but I didn't cope very well with the ACS search engine, so I eventually just decided to wait until I had the printed version to browse through. Even then, it was difficult to know where to start. With hindsight, perhaps if I'd arrived in Chicago early enough to register yesterday, that would have give me more time to browse the technical program before things got under way.

Of course, choosing which lectures to attend is only part of it - finding the lecture theatre can be a task in itself. And if you have any plans to hop between sessions to cherry-pick lectures, think carefully - the lecture theatres can be distant from each other, so you might end up missing chunks of the talks.

Some of the lecture theatres are huge, which oddly enough was a problem sometimes. I saw some excellent talks today, with respectable attendances, but when the audience is scattered across a vast room it can seem as if there's only a few people there. It's only when you find yourself joining the throng trying to get lunch that you realize just how many people there are.

A conference this size must be a logistical nightmare to organize, and barring a few niggles (more restaurants perhaps? And a hotel room that actually had its own bed would have been good last night - don't ask) it' s been a great day. I can't wait for tomorrow. How was it for you?

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 06:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I made it in to Chicago late last night (only two hours late, which for isn't that bad for O'Hare...) There must have been a few chemists on my flight, as I wasn't the only person who chuckled when they announced that our pilot's name was Dave Evans...

I got up early this morning to check email, plan my day at the conference, and make a few last minute adjustments to an iPod playlist (it's a 20-25 minute bus ride from my hotel to the convention center). When traveling for work, I usually create a playlist to 'match' the location of the conference: Radiohead works well if you're heading off to an RSC conference, but a meeting in Chicago really calls for some Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters... (This isn't always easy - I'm not sure what I'm going to do for the 2009 ACS meeting in Salt Lake City. Any suggestions?)

Anyways, this morning I saw a great talk from Dennis Dougherty - most of the talk focused on cation-pi interactions in ligand-gated ion channels (for example, the Cys-loop superfamily) and how his laboratory has used unnatural amino acid mutagenesis to dissect how nicotinic acetylcholine receptors work (click here for his Nature paper from 2005 - I think it's a great demonstration of how organic/physical organic chemistry can be used to reveal how a biological system works...)

After grabbing a quick (and remarkably expensive) bite to eat, I went to Linda Hsieh-Wilson's and Jotham Coe's talks, both of which were great. Coe talked about Varenicline/Chantix, which looks like it'll really be able to help people who want to quit smoking.

If you're blogging from the conference, please let us know/please feel free to mention it in the comments section - so far, I know that

Richard from Chemistry World

Egon from chem-bla-ics

Kyle from The Chem Blog

are here (I'm not sure if all of them are blogging, though...) As Katharine mentioned, her news@nature blog posts can be found here.

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 06:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi from the ACS. I'm reporting for news@nature while I'm here, and you can read it all here.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As you probably guessed, several editors will be attending the spring ACS meeting next week - you might remember that we created special conference websites for the spring and fall ACS meetings last year. This year there's been a major overhaul to our Chemistry Portal - in addition to the list of recent content from Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Protocols, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, and news@nature.com, there's a new section entitled "Looking Back."

The "Looking Back" page contains a list of Nature chemistry papers that 'caught our eye' for one reason or another and were published between 1950 and 2000 - there are a few 'classic' Nature papers (for example, Watson & Crick's Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid and Kroto et al.'s C60: Buckminsterfullerene) and a few you might recognize from courses you took in college or graduate school (for example, Jones et al.'s paper Stereochemistry of phosphoryl group transfer using a chiral [16O, 17O, 18O] stereochemical course of alkaline phosphatase and Nicolaou et al.'s Total synthesis of taxol). There's even a 1950 paper from RB Woodward (Structure of chlorodesoxypatulinic acid) and a 1969 paper from EJ Corey (Biological activity of synthetic prostaglandins)... Have a favorite? Think we missed a key paper? Please let us know...

As Katharine mentioned yesterday, we've also put together a special issue of Nature - the issue is packed full of chemistry, so if you're at the meeting, swing by the NPG booth and pick up a free copy...

There's a News & Views Q&A on C-H activation from Bob Bergman, a review article from David Gorin & Dean Toste on relativistic effects in homogeneous gold catalysis, a Careers and Recruitment piece in our Naturejobs section, and several primary research papers:

Total synthesis of marine natural products without using protecting groups by Phil Baran et al. (click here to read the N&V)

Biasing reaction pathways with mechanical force by Charles Hickenboth et al. (click here to read the N&V)

BluB cannibalizes flavin to form the lower ligand of vitamin B12 from Michiko Taga et al. (click here to read the N&V)

We'll be adding blog entries throughout the conference, so please check back frequently to see what we’re writing about...

See you at the meeting!

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, this blog is slightly overdue, since the ACS meeting has been over for nearly a week. But, I think I'm still adjusting back to East Coast time, so clearly I couldn't be expected to muse on all the interesting talks I saw until now?! Also I've been at a loss without my phone, although I have to say, a phone is easier to recover than your heart (but thanks, Tony, for the title suggestion), especially when you just leave it at a friend's house...

Anyway, as a final wrap-up from me on the meeting: I went to the "Biocatalysis in polymer science; New materials" session for the afternoon on Thursday, and I have to say that I was impressed both by the quality of talks and the number of people listening to them, as Thursday at an ACS meeting does have the reputation of being a bit of a ghost town.

Three talks that particularly interested me:

Atanu Biswas (of the USDA), who is studying soybean oil as a source of polymer starting materials and biodegradable synthons. These oils, which contain multiple double bonds, have proven difficult to substitute in the past, as all kinds of polymers and crosslinked species are generated. He and his colleagues previously tackled the problem of creating monomeric, functionalized oils by first creating the epoxidized molecule, and then reacting it with amines. In this talk, he reported the use of DEAD to generate hydrazine-substituted molecules. They then utilized these compounds in further reactions to generate Diels-Alder products and some polymers.

Sabine Wallner (a postdoc in Richard Gross' lab) is studying the metathesis of sophorolipids, natural surfactants consisting of two sugars and a lipid chain that sometimes cyclize spontaneously to form a 26-atom ring. Successful polymerization of these compounds, which are excreted by cells, would result in a biodegradable polymer with many potential uses. What was especially interesting about this talk is that ROMP is normally facilitated by ring strain in the monomeric material. Yet the cyclic sophorolipid is unlikely to be strained because of the very large ring size. In any case, they've gotten polymers of up to 100 kD, indicating that there is a lot to learn about this system.

Finally, HN Cheng (from Hercules Incorporated, also one of the chairs of the session) gave a great talk on the application of lipases to create polyamides. Their rationale for the project was to create nylon with an additional amine in the backbone so that it would be water soluble. This isn't possible with regular polymerization conditions, as the secondary amine would react to form a branch point. He told us that his team had been busy trying to make proteases do this reaction, since it's just the reverse of their normal function, but with no success. When they tried lipases, though, they got nice polymers both because the formation of amide bonds is not so different from ester bonds, and because the cleavage of these bonds is not possible for the lipase. By careful choice of starting materials, they were able to create multiple polymers that just wouldn't be accessible with standard synthetic techniques.

In addition to the good talks of the session, I was impressed with the discussions that ensued - clearly everyone was paying attention and there were some helpful suggestions for the authors. Congrats to the POLY section for an exciting meeting.

Catherine Goodman (Assistant Editor at Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 05:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

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)

After the morning session, I jumped in a cab and went to UCSF's Mission Bay campus - it's a 43-acre campus that was acquired at no cost to the university and contains a number of laboratories, centers, and research institutes. It's quite large and is getting bigger: "[a]bout 1,700 faculty, students, scholars and staff already work in the new UCSF Mission Bay campus community. At full build-out, 9,100 people are expected to work and study at the new campus."

I had a meeting with a professor in Genentech Hall, a 434,000 square foot building where many of the chemical biologists work (there are also a number of structural, molecular, and developmental biologists in the building).

It truly is a beautiful building, and the entire campus looks like it'd be a great place to work - none of the grey/dirty walls and strange odors found in older chemistry/biochemistry bulidings... I'd highly recommend checking out the campus next time you're in San Francisco - but security is pretty tight, so you might want to sign up for the tour. In the meantime, click here for the virtual tour...

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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)

I went to the carbohydrate-protein interactions and glycolipids session this morning (I'm at the ACS, in case you forgot). It was a great session! Even with the best efforts from the session chair, there were so many questions that we got way behind (which unfortunately meant that I missed George Wang's talk due to a previous engagement). One particularly interesting part of the morning was yet another tribute to Emil Fischer, who seems to have done more work in his life than occurs in a year at most universities. In this particular story, Jacqueline Gervay-Hague was discussing the troubles with substituting sugars at the alpha position, and had tried to use trimethylsilyl iodine in combination with an alcohol to activate the center and incorporate the alcohol as a substituent. To her amazement, her student didn't form the ester, but instead purified the iodated sugar. They looked back in the literature for any precedent of stable iodo-substituted sugars, and found that Fischer not only made them, but crystallized them back in 1910. The secret? The alpha-substituted sugar is stable, whereas the beta-functionalized position reacts right away. They have since used this insight to couple unprotected lipids to TMS-protected sugars; with the right purification conditions, they get the unprotected final product in one step.

Catherine Goodman (Assistant Editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 05:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The morning session of the Arthur C. Cope Award and Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards just finished - I was really impressed with F. Dean Toste's talk, which was a whirlwind tour of some of the work his group has done involving gold(I)-catalyzed reactions.

There are now a number of groups exploring the chemistry of gold(I) and gold(III) complexes - Toste's group has focused on gold(I) complexes, which are air-/moisture-tolerant and able to catalyze a number of reactions, including the stereoselective cyclopropanation of olefins and intramolecular acetylenic Schmidt reactions (making substituted pyrroles). They've also shown that these reactions can be used to make natural products, recently demonstrating that the gold(I)-catalyzed cyclization of a silyl enol ether onto an alkyne enabled them to rapidly synthesize (+)-lycopladine A (in eight steps with 17% overall yield from the starting enone).

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

David Schwartz gave a great talk this afternoon - he's the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which recently created the 'Genes and Environment Initiative,' a five-year research effort that hopes to identify the genetic and environmental causes of asthma, arthritis, and other common diseases.

The initiative has two components: the first involves "efficiently analyzing genetic variation in groups of patients with specific illnesses," and the second involves the development of new devices that can monitor "personal environmental exposures that interact with genetic variations and result in human diseases."

Why - you might ask - is the NIH spending approximately 192 million dollars on this new initiative? Well, we know that "[g]enetic and environmental factors, including diet and life-style, both contribute to cardiovascular disease, cancers, and other major causes of mortality," and there's a growing body of evidence that suggests that environmental factors are responsible for a large percentage of these diseases.

The NIEHS will use a portion of this money to fund grants that involve "innovative new technologies to measure environmental toxins, dietary intake and physical activity, and to determine an individual's biological response to those influences, using new tools of genomics, proteomics and metabolomics," so this looks like an excellent opportunity for chemists interested in complex diseases and human health.

For more information on the NIEHS 2006–2011 Strategic Plan, see "New Frontiers in Environmental Sciences and Human Health."

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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)

I only have time for a quick post before I run off to David Schwartz's talk on 'Environmental genomics and human health.' I just left the H.C. Brown Legacy Symposium, where Professor Sharpless talked about 'click' chemistry, azido-phobia, pandas, and Kevin Kelly's Out of Control (which he highly recommended). Needless to say, it was a great talk and I learned a few new things about 'click' chemistry: it turns out that the Huisgen 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition works pretty well in Jack Daniel's whiskey and in human plasma...

I also bumped into Mark Peplow, who used to work at Nature and is now the editor of Chemistry World. He's blogging about the conference, and he's not alone: the ACS, Tenderblog, the Chem Blog, and Chemical Forums are here too... Update: C&EN and Peter Murray-Rust are also blogging from the conference.

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | 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)

After my recent trip to San Diego, I'm heading back to California for the ACS meeting in San Francisco. The meeting looks great (especially for us chemical biology types); if you want to see what I'll be up to (and some of the other NPG editors), check out our editor's choice site (I know, Josh already told you that).

What's on my mind at the moment, though, is the overall organization of the meeting.

Can we make any sense out of the variation in assigning anything from 20-45 minutes to each speaker? Is it the ongoing conflict of wanting to accommodate more speakers versus really giving them the chance to say something? Is it a statement on the standards of behavior for the different subsections? Or is it all about the seniority of the speaker? Of course we wouldn't see graduate students giving plenary lectures, but I have seen some pretty established/respected professors lined up for 20 minute slots.

As a side note: The bonus of finding a session filled with 20-minute talks by professors is that it's likely that you will come out of the session with 8 times more information in your head than was there going in. The bad part about risking your time on a session without professors is that information may have actually leaked out of your head by the time you can gather your wits enough to leave. (Please note that I say this as one who gave a student seminar not that long ago...)

How can graduate students get more out of the meeting than just a rambling haze of science, intermingled with rambling hazes revolving around drink tickets redeemed at their friends' poster sessions? Certainly my first ACS meetings were overwhelming, with the number of talks that I 'must see' filling more hours than I had and the uptake on new scientific information limited to the first day or two before my brain got full. Students and postdocs on the job hunt seem to be much more focused and calm. Perhaps the secret is going in on a mission?

How can everyone get more out of the poster sessions? These events have become so huge that it's almost impossible to find anyone or anything on purpose. My recent experiences have pretty much relied on wandering around and looking for interesting stuff, regardless of whether it's related to my work at all. To be fair, I've met some great people and found out about amazing work that way, but theoretically poster sessions could serve a much more important function of meeting people in your field to share ideas and experimental advice.

What are your thoughts on ACS meetings? How do you get the most out of them? What, in fact, does it mean to 'get the most out of them' when there are talks to be listened to, jobs to be interviewed for, free pens to be accepted, a new city to be seen...? Let me know, and I'll try to put your advice into practice. Alternatively, you can wait for the meeting updates and see how my new secret plan works.

Catherine Goodman (Assistant Editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I mentioned yesterday, I'll be attending the ACS meeting next week... You might remember that we created a special conference website for the Spring ACS meeting - well, we've updated the conference website for this ACS meeting:

- once again, there is a list of some of the sessions the editors will be attending.

- there is a special edition of the Nature Podcast, in which Dr. Simon Frantz talks with the authors of several recent chemistry papers from Nature, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Materials, and Nature Methods. The five papers featured on this podcast are:

Enantioselective silyl protection of alcohols catalysed by an amino-acid-based small molecule by Zhao et al. (Nature)
Targeting proteases: successes, failures and future prospects by Turk (Nature Reviews Drug Discovery)
Small-molecule activation of procaspase-3 to caspase-3 as a personalized anticancer strategy by Putt et al. (Nature Chemical Biology)
Molecular computational elements encode large populations of small objects by de Silva et al. (Nature Materials)
An unnatural hydrophobic base pair system: site-specific incorporation of nucleotide analogs into DNA and RNA by Hirao et al. (Nature Methods)

We've also added a few recently published papers to the list of exciting chemistry papers from Nature, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Materials, and Nature Methods - some of these papers can be downloaded for free during the ACS meeting. We hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as we did, and would love to hear what you think about them...

And finally, I'd like to mention that this happens to be our 100th blog entry - on behalf of all of us, I'd like to thank you for coming back here week after week...

We'll be adding blog entries throughout the conference, so please check back frequently to see what we’re writing about...

See you at the meeting!

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...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)

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)

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)

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)

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)