Here are the highlights from yesterday's tweets from the 2009 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

7.43am Final day of lectures here in Lindau (although not the final day of the meeting), and this morning will be a GFP extravaganza!

8.02am Shimomura is first up - telling us about the chemistry of bioluminescence

8.19am Interesting fact of the day from Shimomura who tells us that krill is the most abundant animal on the earth

8.31am Chalfie - I'm the accidental Laureate that got into the middle of this - he works on sensory mechanotransduction

8.33am Chalfie has spent a lot of his career 'tickling worms' - C. elegans that is - to find out how they respond to touch

9.08am Students and postdocs are the real innovators in science according to Chalfie

9.13am Final lecture of the 1st session is given by Roger Tsien - who will tell us about some of the mistakes he made & where he got lucky

9.48am Tsien - 'normally there is nothing green inside a mouse'!

9.51am Tsien has yet to run a gel or do a PCR reaction in his life - if he had to hire himself, he wouldn't do it!!

10.01am Schrock takes the stage - co-recipient of the 2005 chem prize (http://bit.ly/axqQt) - apologises for not being at the whole meeting

10.34am Schrock shows some 14 electron Mo catalysts that have 4 different groups on the metal centre - chiral metal catalysts on the way?

10.42am Take home message from Schrock - air-sensitive catalysts are good (not bad) if they can do something other catalysts can't

10.46am Final formal lecture of Lindau 09 given by Werner Arber, Laureate in Physiology or Medicine from 1978 (http://bit.ly/g1V74)

10.52am Arber is using a computer slideshow for his talk on 'Molecular Darwinism' - but all the slides are drawn by hand!

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tomorrow the Lindau Meeting shifts to another island in Lake Constance. Early in the morning, delegates will climb aboard a boat and be ferried across the lake to the island of Mainau - a trip taking more than a couple of hours. Here we will be treated to a panel discussion about 'Global Warming and Sustainability' with quite a distinguished line-up. As well as Laureates Molina and Schrock, the panel also includes Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - which won the Peace Prize in 2007. Other participants include the author Bjorn Lomborg, and Professors William Moomaw and Thomas Stocker.

Because it is unlikely I'll have good web access tomorrow, I figured I should briefly post about Thursday's activities before I go. The first session of lectures amounted to a green fluorescent protein (GFP) extravaganza, with talks from Shimomura, Chalfie and Tsien (last year's recipients of the chemistry prize). We were treated to some very colourful slides, including a green bunny and the incredible hulk! It was nice to hear both Chalfie and Tsien talk about Doug Prasher's contribution to the area - the 'missing' Laureate in GFP research.

Both Chalfie and Tsien had stories to tell about getting their seminal papers published. Editors at a certain high-profile journal objected to Chalfie using the word 'new' in the title of his paper, saying that all work they published was new! Perhaps more amusing, however, was when someone from the art department got in touch with Chalfie about his cover image - they really liked the picture, but there was one colour they didn't really like to use on the cover, so could they get rid of the green...?! 'No', said Chalfie.

Tsien's story about publishing the crystal structure of GFP was one of referee trouble (at the same journal Chalfie struggled with). The first referee said that it was a competent crystal structure, but the protein was not very interesting! The second referee said it was all well and good but the paper didn't answer the most important question about GFP - it's biological role in the jellyfish! The manuscript was rejected and when Tsien appealed, the editor sent it to a third referee. Many months passed, however, and the third referee never replied. Then, on the internet, Tsien found a comment from someone saying that they had solved the crystal structure of GFP and it was coming out the following month in a different journal - Tsien forwarded this to the editor and the paper was accepted the next day! Moral of the story - be careful what you say on the internet...

Both Chalfie and Tsien had some great quotes - I include a few below (I can't guarantee that I have the wording exactly correct, but the meaning remains unaltered):

Chalfie:

It's very hard to tell if an animal is touch-sensitive if it is dead!
I'm the accidental Laureate that got into the middle of this.
Students and postdocs are the real innovators in science.

Tsien:

Biology has the most interesting grand questions in all of science currently doable by individuals.
I was no smarter the day after I received the Nobel prize than the day before, but it made me a lot more famous!
Prizes are ultimately a matter of luck, so avoid being motivated or impressed by them.

After the coffee break, the final two lectures at this Lindau Meeting were delivered by Richard Schrock (Chemistry 2005) and Werner Arber (Physiology or Medicine 1978). Schrock gave us a tour through his Mo and W metathesis catalysts, showing some recent work on being able to make Z-olefins, rather than the more thermodynamically stable E isomers. He was also eager to point out that although his catalysts are air and water sensitive (in contrast to the Ru catalysts of Grubbs and others), this does not matter if (i) you're making a billion-dollar drug or (ii) there is no other way of doing the same reaction. Anyone out there in pharma-land wish to comment on part (i)?

Finally, Countess Bernadotte wrapped up this part of the meeting, thanking the Laureates, the young researchers, the organisers and even the media - very nice to get a mention! We then headed off with Schrock to film with two students, although extracting a Nobel Laureate from adoring fans who want photos and autographs is not an easy task... but eventually we made it to the shoot location in a nearby hotel. Once that was finished, my headache finally got the better of me and I headed out of the heat and back to where I am staying - and now because it's a really early start tomorrow (and I'm not a big fan of those), I'm off to bed...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

PS: There are lots of other people blogging from the meeting - check out some of these posts and have a poke around at each place for other Lindau entries here, here, here, here and here (apologies to those posts/bloggers I may have missed - feel free to leave links in the comments to this post).

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are the highlights from yesterday's tweets from the 2009 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

Wednesday 01 July

8.02am Day 3 begins here in Lindau and first up is Rudy Marcus (http://bit.ly/3tUJT) - sole recipient of the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1992

8.38am Next speaker is Kurt Wüthrich (http://bit.ly/dBaqV) who won a half-share of the 2002 chemistry prize

8.43am Wüthrich uses his belt to represent the human genome... 1.8 m of DNA - although he says his belt is not quite that large (yet)

9.16am The final talk before the coffee break is Sir Harry Kroto (http://bit.ly/Kd08W) speaking about science, society and sustainability

9.22am Kroto just explained chemistry and life in 30 seconds (I think he may have skimmed over a few important bits)

9.40am Kroto - if no-one finds a use for C60 soon, I may have to give the prize back...!

10.23am Coffee break over and Robert Huber - Laureate in '88 (http://bit.ly/2lwtV5) - is speaking about the destruction of molecules

11.13am Coming to the stage now is Walter Kohn - co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1998 (http://bit.ly/dvcaL) with Pople

11.20am Kohn is showing us a film he made called 'The Power of the Sun' - narrated by, if I am not mistaken, John Cleese!

11.44am Kohn would not be surprised if our two major forms of energy are solar and wind after the transition from fossil fuels

11.51am Final speaker today is Peter Agre - Laureate in Chemistry in 2003 (http://bit.ly/J6Hxl) on canoeing in the arctic

12.02pm Agre points out that one of his companions on his Arctic trips deserves a Nobel Prize for baking bread using camp fire & stones!

You can read Stu's full take on yesterday's proceedings in his post Lindau09: And now for something completely different.

Posted by Neil Withers at 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wednesday morning at the Lindau meeting saw a full slate of talks from half-a-dozen Chemistry Laureates: Marcus (1992), Wüthrich (2002), Kroto (1996), Huber (1988), Kohn (1998), Agre (2003) - and some of the highlights are covered below...

Marcus joked that he was going to speak for a couple of hours, but finished exactly on time after 35 minutes, giving us a tour of catalysis in many different forms, such as the 'on-water' work by Sharpless through to single-molecule enzyme catalysis. The next lecture was from Wüthrich, who started off by telling us that 'NMR' does not stand for 'no meaningful results' and then proceeded to take off his belt - and fortunately he stopped there! He then went on to use his belt to illustrate the human genome.

The final talk of the first session was from Kroto, who spoke on themes of science, society and sustainability. His lecture was a barrage on the senses (albeit a very entertaining one), with slides popping up at a high rate of knots, with occasional sound effects to boot. We were shown examples of artwork that Kroto had produced, including stamps, and even a new design for the flag of Japan. He then moved on to topics such as creationism and religion in general, Web 2.0 opportunities for science and scientific education, and the fact that he may have to give his prize back if no one finds a use for C60 in the near future! Kroto left the stage to the longest and loudest applause of the meeting so far.

After the coffee break, Huber was the first speaker, although the computer on which the presentations were loaded would not play ball. Problems finally solved, he went on to tell us about protein degradation. Kohn was next up and apart from a brief intro and wrap up, his 'lecture' consisted of showing a film he had made, called 'The power of the sun' - narrated by John Cleese of Monty Python fame. No ex-parrots in sight unfortunately! The final talk of the day was given by Agre, who told us about his canoeing trips in the arctic and sub-arctic. Although he tied his talk to environmental themes and climate issues, such as the changing migration paths of caribou and the impact on native hunters, it was hard not to think that we were just seeing his holiday snaps (very pretty ones, nonetheless!).

Lectures over for the day, I went to help out the film crew once more. The first shoot was a conversation between one of the young researchers (Tyler) and Ernst. As the storm clouds gathered in the distance and the thunder got louder, lightning crackled across the sky and the heavens opened - making filming impossible. With lots of camera equipment and a Nobel Laureate in tow, we tried to take the most direct (and driest) route back inside the conference venue. Our way was barred by the conference stewards, who probably assumed we wanted to film the afternoon discussions (which is not allowed - in fact, no press are allowed in those sessions at all) - whereas all we wanted to do was get inside to then go and find a new location. Tyler came to the rescue — his German being better than any of ours — and finally persuaded the stewards to let us in... he pointed out that we had a Laureate with us, who probably shouldn't get soaked in a thunderstorm. So, there you have it, getting the call from Stockholm can open doors for you!

Two shoots later, with Ciechanover and Tsien, it was time to wind down for the day and plan our activities for Thursday - just one shoot I need to be at today, so may have a little free time later this afternoon to explore Lindau. There may not be a post tomorrow, as we're off to the island of Mainau and away from the wireless access here in the Inselhalle, but they'll be a couple of more Lindau posts at some point.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 05:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tuesday morning at Lindau saw three talks from Laureates - Aaron Ciechanover (Chemistry 2004), Mario Molina (Chemistry 1995), and Erwin Neher (Physiology or Medicine 1991). Unfortunately I was called away just at the start of the first talk to shuttle our van around Lindau and only made it back half-way through Molina's talk. Jason - one of my colleagues here - had it even worse, however, as he headed over to Zurich (almost a 300-km round trip!) to pick up essential equipment for the film crew.

After the coffee break, we were treated to the first of two panel discussions here at the meeting - this one was about the role and future of chemistry for renewable energy. Sitting on the panel were Laureates Ertl, Grubbs, Kohn, Kroto, Marcus, Molina and Rowland - quite a line-up! The moderator framed various problems at the opening of the discussion, in particular (i) the fact that fossil fuels will not last forever, (ii) anthropogenic climate change as a consequence of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and (iii) security problems with nuclear energy technologies. Each Laureate was invited to respond in an opening statement and some snippets are included below.

Ertl reminded us that we cannot create (nor destroy) energy and that our problems simply boil down to how we can harness the power of the sun to produce useful energy that can be stored in a practical fashion - he suggested that silicon photovoltaics are potentially a promising way forward. Grubbs reminded us that he was the only organic chemist on the panel (the first time I've heard him describe himself as an organic chemist!) and that materials science is a crucial and enabling technology for renewable energies, in terms of making energy storage and transport more efficient. Kohn summed up the situation by telling us that tough problems must be tackled by viewing them from many different perspectives.

Next was Kroto, who said that we need to recognise the scale of the problem - telling us that it takes a million years to produce the quantity of fossil fuels we currently consume each year. Water splitting is what we should focus on in his opinion - and recounted someone telling him that if 'stupid' trees can do it, then we should be able to do it too! The problem is that trees really aren't that stupid after all - nature has had a long time to figure out photosynthesis. Sir Harry went on to criticise how science is funded, and pointed out that breakthroughs often come from blue-sky research and that governments and funding agencies should continue to fund such work.

Marcus was next and brought up the point that not only is solar energy conversion an important societal challenge, but is also a very interesting and stimulating intellectual challenge. Large numbers of researchers and good collaborations are required - and he suggested that a mini Manhattan Project is in order (obviously with a very different goal, but using the same principle of bringing together leading scientists and engineers from around the world to tackle a pressing problem).

Molina and Rowland rounded out the opening statements, with Molina suggesting that society needs to double or triple its investment in renewable energy - and although it may look self-serving for a scientist working in this area to say this, it is wholly justified. Finally Rowland lamented the fact that he had to say something original after following six other Laureates! Nevertheless, he did, saying that we should focus on getting rid of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and also look at other nuclear fusion approaches, although he was less optimistic about these.

Finally, the moderators presented questions to the Laureates that had been prepared by the students - and much discussion ensued about the best way to tackle the energy problems we face as scientists and as a society.

That concluded the open scientific activities for the day and then I went off to my other career here, that of a helping hand with the film crew. First off we filmed a couple of the young researchers chatting with Peter Agre and then headed off to one of the hotels to film a discussion between Molina, Rowland and three students moderated by Olive from the Climate Feedback blog.

After that, there was another production meeting to discuss the filming schedule for today and that will kick into high gear after lunch - and stories will follow tomorrow...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 05:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are the highlights from yesterday's tweets from the 2009 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

Tuesday 30 June

8.50am And speaking now is Mario Molina (http://bit.ly/qA6Zf) - the third of the 'ozone hole' Laureates to speak at the meeting

8.57am Molina - no silver bullet for solving climate problems, need to implement a number of different measures to tackle the problem

9.16am Next 'guest' Laureate is Erwin Neher (http://bit.ly/IvcoH), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology & Medicine, not chemistry! Neher is going to tell us about how chemistry helps neuroscience

10.10am Incredible Laureate line-up for panel discussion: Ertl, Grubbs, Kohn, Kroto, Marcus, Molina, Rowland - let's see where this goes...

10.21am Ertl reminds us that we cannot create energy, just convert it from one form to another (pesky laws of thermodynamics!)

10.26am Grubbs points out he's the only organic chemist on the panel - and says that new materials are vital for energy storage/transport

10.42am Kroto reminds us that some of the most important breakthroughs come from blue-sky research and so we must continue to fund it! Met with applause from the audience.

10.52am Molina says that society must double or triple its investment if we are to make headway in tackling the energy problem

11.01am Rowland suggests we should concentrate on the problem of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

11.05am Question - can we combine chemical & biological systems to address energy problems? Maybe, but it seems nature has a big head start

11.12am Kroto - does the amount of money poured into the Manhattan project compare with the funding of nuclear fusion projects?

11.16am Ertl - still lots of open questions in nuclear fusion, but that's no reason not to continue...

11.18am What do you say to people who don't believe in climate change? Listen to Prof. Molina says Ertl!!

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On day 1 of the Lindau Meeting, art and science collided in more than one way... here's what I got up to.

First port of call was the Inselhalle on the island of Lindau (which is connected to the mainland by road and rail). The island is a pleasant 20-30 minute walk from our hotels on the mainland, or just a few minutes drive in the space-age VW van we have been kindly given for the duration of the meeting. It has a few thousand miles on the clock but has a genuine new car smell - so much so, I though it was brand new.

Anyway the morning began in a packed lecture hall and the first Laureate to speak was the 2007 Nobel Prize recipient, Gerhard Ertl. So, the conference kicked off with some hardcore catalysis - the kind that takes place on solid surfaces. We were treated to some pretty patterns associated with complex reactions - such as the BZ reaction.

Art featured much more heavily in the second lecture of the day, which was delivered by the 1991 awardee, Richard Ernst. He told us that there is much beyond traditional science, such as arts and humanities and that we should have 'passions' outside of science to make us more complete individuals. His lecture ranged from the cultural history of central Asia - including, in particular, Tibetan art, of which he is a collector - to science education for monks and nuns in south India: 'Science meets Dharma'. Ernst talked us through some fascinating pieces of art - and then moved on to art restoration and chemical techniques for pigment analysis, nicely weaving together his interests in art and science.

The first session of the day was rounded out by Ryoji Noyori whose theme was very much that chemistry is the key to our future. The moral to his story was that while nature gives us many wonderful molecules, the synthetic chemist can make so many more, and as we develop newer and better methodology, we can make them selectively and efficiently. He ended by saying that education is key and that the young researchers at the meeting are crucial for our (chemical) future.

After the coffee break, the first two speakers were Sherwood Rowland and Paul Crutzen - co-recipients of the 1995 Nobel Prize (along with Mario Molina). If you ever had any doubts about anthropogenic climate change, then you need to listen to these eminent scientists speak. The first day was then rounded out by Hartmut Michel - who received the Nobel Prize in 1988 - telling us about cytochrome c oxidase.

That was it for lectures, but then in the afternoon I turned runner/boom operator for the film crew shooting the Nature videos. I went from Laureate chauffer - driving SIr Harry Kroto and his wife to the location of the filming - to 'microphone stand' - which my colleague Sam assures me is the technical term for a boom operator... - I think he might be winding me up...

Anyway, after a successful shoot, Prof. Kroto and his wife had a much smoother ride back to their hotel when someone else drove the VW van, and then finally the team got together for some well-deserved tex-mex as the sun slowly set. Discussions about filming for today ensued, and then we made our way back to our hotels to recharge for today - which you can find out about tomorrow! More then...

For other NPG blogging, check out the Climate Feedback blog and Olive's post about the renewable energy panel discussion earlier today.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For those of you who don't follow our Twitter feed, I'm going to summarise Stu's output from the 2009 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting on a daily basis

Mon 29 June

8.03am And here we go with the scientific part of the meeting after the opening ceremony yesterday - first up is Ertl http://bit.ly/txc5R

8.23am Ertl compares the reaction between carbon monoxide and oxygen to the 'reaction' between hares and lynxes and the fur trade - clever!

8.34am Ertl talks about spiral patterns in reactions & complexity - such as in the BZ reaction; see here for more info http://bit.ly/1nDFsB

8.35am And now it's Richard Ernst (http://bit.ly/RFJ34) who will talk about passions and activities beyond science

9.03am Ernst says that 'NMR is useless' for pigment analysis - use Raman spectroscopy instead; he does this at home!

9.13am Third lecture of the morning is from Ryoji Noyori (http://bit.ly/it8MF) talking about chemistry as the key to our future

9.16am Noyori: "close involvement with society is the destiny of science"

10.19am Second session of the morning begins with Sherwood Rowland (http://bit.ly/qA6Zf) talking about green house gases & climate change

10.31am What does it take for a molecule to be a greenhouse gas? - well, one requirement is a minimum of 3 atoms (for IR absorption)

10.48am Now on stage is Paul Crutzen (http://bit.ly/qA6Zf), who says that Rowland is a hard act to follow, but that he has better slides!

11.48am Final speaker of the open scientific sessions today is Hartmut Michel (http://bit.ly/2lwtV5) - talking about cytochrome c oxidase

11.56am So, open talks on day 1 are over. The afternoon will see closed-session discussions between the young researchers & Laureates

If you want to ask Stuart questions as he tweets, get on Twitter and direct your queries @NatureChemistry!

Posted by Neil Withers at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, the NPG team and film crew arrived on Saturday afternoon in Germany and after checking in to our hotels on the mainland, we made our way over to the island of Lindau to meet some prospective students for the series of videos that we are producing. Much discussion ensued over dinner later in the evening and the plan for the films started to crystallise - calls were made and appointments set.

Sunday morning began with some filming of some of the students chosen to speak with the Laureates in the films. This involved finding locations on the scenic island of Lindau where there was enough sun, but not too much - and as little background noise as possible. You really don't notice how noisy 'background noise' can be until you need to film! Cobbled streets and roller-suitcases make for quite a din!

Sunday afternoon then saw the opening ceremony at Lindau, which began with a very eloquent and moving address to the assembled delegates from Countess Bettina Bernadotte, President of the Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings. Two new members were admitted to the Honorary Senate of the Foundation Lindau Nobelprizewinners Meetings at Lake Constance - José Barroso, President of the EU-Commission and Kapil Sibal, Indian Minister for Human Resource Development.

The ceremony drew to a close after a discussion on the stage with five of the young researchers who are attending the meeting, during which they described what is required to succeed in science - with answers ranging from good collaborations, support, ambition, and perhaps even a little bit of luck.

We've now just had the first scientific session, with talks from Ertl, Ernst and Noyori - I'll gather my thoughts and then tell you all about it a little later, but now the second session is moments away. For live updates, you can follow on Twitter!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sadly it’s my final day in Paris, but the conference has finished in fine style with a selection of talks largely focusing on organometallic chemistry and catalysts. I have a soft spot for organometallic chemistry, and so too did the audience it seems, since the lecture theatre was full, even though many attendees were probably slightly hungover from last night’s conference dinner.

But then again, who would miss the chance to see Richard Schrock? He gave a fascinating talk describing the development of his (and Amir Hoveyda's) stereogenic-at-metal catalysts for asymmetric metathesis reactions (Nature subscribers can read the first report of this work here; JACS subscribers can read the latest paper on the subject here). I was also interested to hear that he has developed catalysts that provide Z-products from metathesis reactions, which has led to the preparation of the first cis- syndiotactic polymer (described in another JACS paper). And there’s more to come - a paper reporting enantio- and endoselective enyne metathesis is currently in press.

So how do you follow that? With Steve Buchwald, of course. He dished out some great advice for those wanting to do C-N bond formations (and I know there are many of you). So, if you’re bewildered by the array of ligands for these reactions, he reckons that one of Xphos, RuPhos (named after his cat, Rufus, by the way) or BrettPhos (which is discussed in this JACS paper) will always do the job. He’s also come up with some useful precatalysts, which he reckons should overcome the problems some people have encountered when using this chemistry (see this JACS paper for a description of the precatalysts).

Not long now before I have to dash off to catch my train home, but there’s just time to mention Jose Barluenga’s talk that discussed the use of Fischer carbene complexes and late transition metal catalysis in organic synthesis (the latter including a rather nice modular approach for making indoles - Angewandte subscribers can read about this here). Perhaps most intriguing was his discussion of a metal-free coupling of tosylhydrazones with boronic acids to make diphenymethane compounds. These were preliminary results, so I’ll be intrigued to see the paper when it’s published.

Right, I’m off to the Gare du Nord. A bientot!

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

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Day two of my conference in sunny Paris, and the talks moved on this afternoon to biological chemistry. Long-term readers of this blog will know that I’m not a chemical biologist, so this will be a relatively brief overview of the topics discussed - but what topics!

Kim Janda largely focused on his work discovering antibodies for various therapeutic applications. I never knew that it might be possible to develop a vaccine for cocaine addiction, but Kim seems to be well on his way, with an antibody treatment that - in animal studies - reduces the amount of cocaine that passes through the blood-brain barrier, and which offers some protection against overdoses with the drug.

Carlos Barbas’s talk also strongly featured antibodies. I was particularly taken with his idea of using bifunctional antibodies in combination with prodrugs for anticancer therapy. The antibodies bind to tumours, but they also unmask anticancer agents from the prodrugs; this ensures that cytotoxic anticancer agents are targeted exclusively to tumours (which is good, because such agents are generally also toxic to healthy cells). He showed that a prodrug of the anticancer drug etoposide, when given to mice with appropriate antibodies, elicits a 75% reduction in tumour growth compared with controls, and with no signs of toxicity.

Thomas Carell gave a brilliant talk about his studies of DNA repair mechanisms, having isolated crystal structures of some of the enzymes concerned when in complex with damaged DNA. And here’s one of those mind-boggling statistics: apparently, in humans, every cell sustains 100,000 lesions to its DNA every day. So be thankful for your photolyases and Y-polymerases, which deal with the problem.

And finally, what was the dispute between George Whitesides and Jean-Marie Lehn yesterday? Well, George was discussing the problems of designing ligands for proteins - his conclusion is that our models for the hydrophobic effect and for how water molecules behave in proteins are basically wrong. But he also declared that the ‘lock-and-key’ model of enzyme-ligand interactions is bogus too: you don’t need a precise, tight fit, as implied by the model, but rather a ‘sloppy’ fit. Jean-Marie, however, defended the lock-and-key model, saying that, at the very least, it is the best way of explaining protein-ligand interactions for non-specialists. And then he went on to use the lock-and-key analogy in his slides.

More from Paris tomorrow…

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

No, I don’t mean Ms Hilton. I’m at the Tenth Tetrahedron Symposium in Paris, celebrating 50 years of Tetrahedron Letters with a stunning programme of speakers - a real who’s who of organic chemists. If you ever have the chance to attend a conference in Paris, you’ve got to go, if only because it’s a foodie’s paradise. The three-course lunch was sensational, and the mini-desserts they’ve been dishing out during coffee breaks are to die for.

But I digress. Let me tell you about the chemistry. Catalysis was the unofficial theme of the morning’s talks. A highlight for me was Masakatsu Shibasaki’s discussion of his work developing asymmetric ‘two-centre’ catalysts (so-called because they contain two different metal atoms). I love hearing how original ideas extend into different directions, and this was a great example of that, as Masakatsu described how the discovery of catalysts for asymmetric Michael reactions led on to the development of catalysts for cyclopropanations, then for epoxide-formations and ultimately for making 2,2-disubstituted oxetanes (Angewandte Chemie subscribers can see the oxetane work here).

After lunch, a smorgasbord of treats awaited us (and not just the petits fours). Peter Vollhardt described unpublished work on the chemistry of phenylenes, including a fascinating description of haptotropism in their cobalt complexes. Michael Krische gave an overview of his work developing carbon-carbon bond-forming reactions via hydrogenations - appropriately enough for the venue, this work was inspired by seminal work from the French chemists Victor Grignard and Paul Sabatier. To my mind, this is a brilliant strategy for C-C bond formations - a minireview in Angewandte about catalytic carbonyl addition through transfer hydrogenation, written by Krische, can be found here (but subscribers only, I‘m afraid).

And that’s not to mention typically mesmerising talks from the likes of George Whitesides and Jean-Marie Lehn (who had a slight disagreement regarding a well-used model of molecular recognition - but more on that tomorrow).

I could go on - but for now, I’ll sign off with an ‘au revoir’.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

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A nice, sunny afternoon in San Francisco, and my jet-lag seems to be under control. As it is my first time at the MRS, not to mention my first meeting as a Nature editor, not to mention my first attempt at blogging, I will try to keep this short and sweet. the meeting is of a manageable size (i.e. it doesn't take half an hour to walk from one talk to the next), a big plus on my side.

There is plenty of interesting stuff to see. In particular a session on 3D architectures for energy storage: Debra Rolison talked about building batteries out of porous MnO2 networks, on which an electrolyte layer is then grown, and RuO2 anodes are deposited, which seems an intriguing idea.

Joanna Aizenberg showed nanorods which become humidity responsive when immersed in a polymer hydrogel, creating surfaces that can be hydrophilic in dry conditions, and superhydrophobic in wet conditions (when it rains?).

Another nice talk by Mike Crommie (of quantum corrals fame) was on STM studies of gated graphene, where he showed that shifting the gate voltage it is possible to image the presence of charge puddles on the sheet, and they are due likely to impurities trapped in the silica substrate.

Posted by Stefano Tonzani at 07:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Man, those physical chemists sure can throw a good chemical biology meeting. I finally got a chance to join in the 'Functional Motions in Enzyme Catalysis' session, and it was well worth the wait. Though each of the three talks was excellent, what was particularly interesting were some of the commonalities that emerged in the lectures and the subsequent panel discussion.

* Vern Schramm pointed out that the conversations throughout this symposium were completely different than what would have been discussed 10 years ago. Things are moving fast.
* As Richard Schowen particularly noted, the question of protein dynamics is big, and is only going to get bigger. One of the seemingly few sources of controversy in the field (or one of the linguistic barriers, as Peter Wolynes suggested) is whether dynamics plays a direct role in catalysis or not.
* Investigations of protein folding and dynamics is growing more and more interdisciplinary.
* It seems the people in the field are adapting well to the significant conceptual shifts. One person even said that, at the beginning of the meeting, he was convinced of one idea, but by the end of the meeting, he needed to rethink.

And for the rest of my thoughts on this, you'll have to stay tuned to the journal in the next few months...

Instead I'll close the conference with two funny quotes from the afternoon, both courtesy of Rudolph Marcus:

"We've got an equation! Now we can test it!"

"Among friends, who cares about a factor of 10 or 100..."

It's funny - often before an ACS meeting, I wonder why I'm going when - as the criticism goes - it's such a big meeting and so impersonal. Yet every time I come away amazed at how much I've learned and what lovely people I met. Looking forward to the next one.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

First, a couple of thoughts:

* Finally I found some people at the meeting today! Or maybe it just helps to use rooms that seat 70 instead of 700.

* The folks in the Division of Chemical Information get a huge thanks today. Their talks (these, and these) were super interesting, they were friendly, and they answered my ultra-stupid questions with grace.

Now, to the main event:

When you sign on as 'press' for the week, you receive some handouts describing all of the press conferences taking place during the meeting. One of the briefings was about a new way to make biodiesel from algae. For some reason I took this to mean metabolic engineering to improve hydrocarbon production, or something, and had never been to a press conference before, so I was pretty psyched up for the whole thing. Unfortunately, as you can see here if you have 7 minutes to kill, it was a bit frustrating, to say the least. It wasn't clear who the woman was that was talking, but she basically read the statement we had already received and then refused to answer any questions, either from lack of knowledge or because the information was proprietary. The three things I actually learned are 1) they may (or may not) have applied for a patent for their new catalyst, 2) there is a transesterification involved, and 3) 'green' doesn't mean the same thing to everyone (particularly note the moderator's reaction - priceless!). I am not normally one to make fun, but this was really a mess. Good luck to you, United Environment and Energy LLC - I hope you have found a commercially viable biodiesel conversion process that will save us all, but this wasn't one to stop the presses for.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I unexpectedly ventured far from my comfort zone to learn about ketosamines and 2-deoxyglucose in cancer treatment on one hand, and boronic acid-based sensors on the other, so I will not attempt to explain the details here as I would undoubtedly get many things wrong. Instead, I have an important question for you.

I got into an interesting conversation this afternoon with two card-carrying chemical biologists (by which I mean, they not only do chemical biology research BUT read our editorials!!) who were curious about our recent editorial calling for the more judicious use of 'data not shown'. One scientist made the point that it is reasonable to use this term when you have the data, and the data could be produced upon the request of an interested referee or reader, but it's obvious from the text how the data look and so there's no great need to show every tiny detail. The other scientist said that it's better for all relevant information/data to be available in the paper, so that it can easily be reproduced and so it's not necessary to call on the author to produce the data at some later point (especially considering that online Supp. Info. is pretty unlimited these days).

The question is: what data should be shown? What is completely obvious and really just takes up space? What may be completely obvious but is still critical to be included? What do people think is obvious but is not? For example, does just listing NMR peaks and splittings constitute 'data not shown', and should we obtain copies of all the original spectra? What about showing the data points/plots used to calculate IC50 values vs. just listing the numbers? Are you annoyed if people include too much information? How could methods be presented more clearly? Why do we need all this data shown - do we not trust each other to do/interpret the work properly, or not trust each other to report our work accurately, or is it simply a matter of having a complete scientific record?

Anyway, I may not know much about ketosamines, but I did read somewhere that you need sleep to help prevent cancer, so I'd best get to it!

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

So as part of my efforts to 'seek out people I don't know', I went to a session yesterday in the colloid division about membranes and membrane proteins. Two talks by a grad student (Niña Hartman) and postdoc (Cheng-Han Yu) (see here for pictures) from Jay Groves' lab were particularly outstanding. They are trying to figure out how TCR channels and other proteins at the immunological synapse are sorted into patterns. The general idea seems to be that clustering controls trafficking, with all kinds of fancy techniques used to provide evidence. The weirder thing to me is, how does the cell know where the synapse is supposed to be?? Something to ponder.

The funny quote of the day came from the morning carbohydrates session, where Amit Basu pointed out (in discussing the very precise molecular recognition of carbohydrate-carbohydrate interactions as compared to more general adhesion properties) that sugar is not equal to a patch of micro-nano-honey.

Now I've got to figure out where I'm going - definitely no pattern to that yet!
Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's carbohydrate session was in honor of Peter Seeberger winning the Hudson Award, with the panel of speakers reflecting Seeberger's interests in oligosaccharide synthesis, antigens and adjuvants, and the complexities of glycosylation as a post-translational modification.

At least 4 different speakers talked in some detail about the importance of sugars in immune responses to bacteria, cancer, and disease. I think they converted me. In particular, Chi-Huey Wong and Geert-Jan Boons are finding new proteins that were either not known to be glycosylated at all or those that are specifically present/upregulated on cancer cells. Can combining these discoveries with new synthetic epitopes for generating immune responses result in the body clearing cancer cells as if they were a bacterial infection? Exciting stuff.

Todd Lowary and Ben Davis both talked a bit about the confusion of different glycoforms. For example, how do you know whether a particular structure is on the biosynthetic pathway to a second glycoform, or whether - as in the case of Lowary's subject, lipoarabinomannan - there are more complex workings in play? Davis just seems to get around the whole thing by developing a continuous number of orthogonal reactions to allow multiple glycan incorporation in what he calls 'post-expression mutagenesis'.

Kwan Soo Kim took us on an interesting trip through the complexities of carbohydrate synthesis, particularly as to whether substituents at the 3-, 4-, and 6-positions can affect the stereoselectivity of carbohydrate coupling at C1. Seeberger is making use of this kind of information in developing his automated carbohydrate synthesizer. He mentioned that he's looking for users to test a beta version of the machine, so feel free to get involved!

After all that glycochemistry talk, I think it's time for dessert.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...this great Nature Chemistry T-shirt!

For those of you in Salt Lake City for the ACS meeting, make sure to stop by the Nature Publishing Group booth (#1508) at the exposition. We've got lots of goodies to give away, including great Nature Chemistry T-shirts. Even better, if you are photographed wearing your T-shirt around the conference by one of us, you will be entered into a prize draw for a Flip Camera - I think we're giving away 7 or 8 of them.

We also have plenty of copies of issue 1 of Nature Chemistry to give away, as well as many other NPG journals. And if that's not enough, there are a few other goodies too - but I won't give away all of our secrets; you'll need to go to our stand and find out for yourself...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 05:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm in Salt Lake City for the spring ACS. Though I grew up not far from here, the mountains in my town were to the west, so it'll be an adjustment. I hope I don't wander into the lake, or down to Arches by mistake...

I've put off looking at the schedule until just now, and I am completely befuddled. How do I decide between 2, let alone 4-5 different sessions that all sound great? Should I go to all 8 iterations of a continuous topic, and really dive in and learn a lot, or should I bounce around learning tidbits about different topics? Should I go to talks by people I've heard of to get the update on what they're doing, or should I seek out people I don't know? Should I go to morning sessions, or poster sessions, or just not sleep at all? Perhaps the first session tomorrow should include some kind of cloning step, so I can really see everything that's going on.

Anyway, the ACS actually wants us editors to play journalist for the week (at least to get free access to the press room - seems fair, really!), so stay tuned for more on where I end up.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ACS meeting is over, so I guess it’s time for me to climb aboard the love train and head for home. Oh, alright then, it’ll be a cramped flight to the UK, I was just trying to squeeze in a reference to the Philly sound before I left.

But before I go, here are a few bits and pieces from the meeting that made me think, smile, or both. A lot of them seem to involve Barry Sharpless.

Some quotes:
“A man in California just won the Nobel prize for mixing paint and wine.” - Headline in a Los Angeles newspaper following Barry Sharpless’s Nobel win.

“This lovely picture of Edinburgh is one that I took recently - from the internet.” - Dave Leigh

“You say this was done with a burette? I could do better with a graduated cylinder.” - Comment from William Crowell on a young John Roberts’ titration technique.

“Enzymes are swirly things, they’re spaghetti monsters.” - Barry Sharpless. Surely not a reference to the cult of the spaghetti monster?

Things I learnt at the meeting:
Some chemistry sets 77 years ago included recipes for gunpowder.

‘Detartrated’ is the longest single-word palindrome in the English language, according to Barry Sharpless. (To detartrate means to remove the tartrate from wine.)

The spell-check program on my laptop corrects ‘aldehydes’ to ‘baldheads’.

Other things that made me smile:
Barry Sharpless’s impression of an olefin.

That’s all for now, I’m heading for home sweet home.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In one of my previous blog posts I mentioned a great presentation given by Steve Chu on Monday and I’ve finally found some time to say a little more.

In his talk he described the current plight of the planet and gave some fantastic insights into the problems we face. He highlighted predictions that have been made about various environmental markers that were frightening. The one that scared me the most was a prediction that Chu said amounts to “unplugging the refrigerator in the north and allowing everything to rot”. He was referring to a positive feedback mechanism that will kick in if the permafrost of the northern hemisphere melts, releasing enormous amounts of methane and carbon dioxide.

On a related cold-storage theme, he gave data that showed that the energy saved through the manufacture of contemporary high efficiency refrigerators is greater than that produced from renewable energy sources! That's not to say we should be just making better refrigerators though. He spoke about several “transformative” technologies that are required to provide step changes in the way energy is created and distributed, arguing that incremental steps won’t solve our problems. The technologies he mentioned included energy storage in batteries, cheaper photovoltaics, a green revolution akin to the “transformative” Haber–Bosch process, and artificial photosynthesis (which took a large step forward recently). And as Katherine pointed out in an earlier post, chemists will play a central role in these developments.

The talk was a massive eye-opener; I knew we were in trouble but when you’re presented with hard facts by such an authoritative and passionate guy, you listen. But, equally he showed there is hope, and that it lies within scientific research.

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Gavin Armstrong at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't spent much time outside the confines of the conference - apart from the sun-drenched stroll between the convention centre and another venue, the Sheraton, about a mile away. So yesterday I thought, enough is enough. I went for a run over the Benjamin Franklin bridge with Neil Gussman, PR guy for the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and US army sergeant.

The run was amazing, the pedestrian bridge is much higher than the cars and the cars are much, much, much higher than the Delaware river. If you need to escape the city, you could do a lot worse than this towering piece of metal engineering.

Today I took another trip to CHF, to check out their new, and very impressive, gallery. It's still under construction, but the floor-to-ceiling interactive periodic table installment (made in part by he of the Periodic Table Table fame, Theo Gray) is already in place. It is awesome. Videos run for each element, and the whole thing cascades from the huge 2-storey ceiling to the floor on a massive array of TV screens.

The new galleries are also hosting a travelling art exhibit, molecules that matter. This is a collection of artists' representations of 10 selected molecules that have influenced society in the past 100 years. Apparently the choice of molecules upset some staunch organic chemists. I can't see why. You should pop over and see if you're getting cabin fever in the conference.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The answer to the question posed above isn't clear. I went to a session about plastic devices that could be used as solar cells instead of expensive silicon, hoping to hear a breakthrough was nigh. Sadly I was wrong. Advances in plastics that can capture light over a useful wavelength, that can separate the charge into electrons and holes, that can carry that charge and finally, do something useful with it, are being made. But slowly.

Talking in the session was Fred Wudl, who was first to develop fullerene/polymer systems as photovoltaic cells. It seems that the system he hit upon first up has been hard to beat, at least according to Mats Andersson, from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, who was also speaking in the session.

Percentage power conversion efficiencies remain low. The very best results are around 5%, and these tend to be from a single, meticulously prepared sample - a long way from a manufacturable, large scale printing process that is hoped for. To be really viable, a system that is 10% efficient is needed, or a slightly less efficient, but very cheap plastic material that can be made to cover a large area. But still, despite lots of tinkering with the polymers in the systems, the best that Andersson presented was 2.8% efficiency. Manpreet Kaur, from Virginia Polytechnic presented a system with an efficiency of 1%.

The systems rely on the electron-transporting properties of a polymer, and the hole (absence of electron) transporting properties of the fullerene groups. The main way to change these systems is altering the polymer groups.

The field is gaining strength, however. One company, Konarka, is claiming that it will have a flexible, efficient, solar cell plastic available by the end of the year. We shall have to wait and see.

The session certainly generated interest, but I can't help thinking that the efficiencies are going to remain low for a while yet. Perhaps next year, if Konarka has delivered, academics will have joined them in finding a more efficient system.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I always like to check out a few sessions at ACS meetings that fall outside my usual beat. This time, I noticed a few interesting sounding sessions on ‘Visualizing chemistry’, so I went along to one this morning. It was fascinating stuff. A positive smorgasbord of imaging techniques awaited me, ranging from mass spectrometry (yes, you can use it to make pictures) to X-ray photoelectron spectromicroscopy. Oh, and there were lots of acronyms.

One thing I wasn’t aware of were how many techniques are available to work out the elemental distribution in a sample. For example, Richard Leapman gave a great talk about the use of STEM-EELS (Scanning transmission electron microscopy-electron energy loss spectroscopy) to generate three-dimensional images of cellular components. In this way, he has produced some great pictures of ribosomes that show exactly where the phosphorus can be found.

Completely different is the aforementioned X-ray photoelectron method. David Surman (he doesn’t have a personal web page, as he works in industry) described the latest imaging innovations in this technology, which produces elemental maps of surfaces. He described an example in which the method was used to study some medical-grade stainless steel samples (used for bone implants and so on), which were found to be prone to corrosion after laser ablation. He discovered that the laser-zapping led to a build-up of chromium at the edges of the ablated region. This build-up was the source of the corrosion problem.

But my favourite talk was from Martin Kessel, representing the High Resolution Electron Microscopy group at the National Cancer Institute, USA. They used 3D electron microscopy to image the ‘spikes’ that stud the surface of HIV. These spikes don’t form a regular pattern on the surface, which makes it difficult to get a reliable image using traditional electron microscopy. But by using a technique that generates an average image from thousands of pictures of individual spikes, a high-resolution structure has been produced. Crystal structures of parts of the proteins that make up the spikes have previously been obtained, and these dock beautifully into the microscope images, thus validating the crystal structures. Furthermore, the microscope has caught an image of the spike in complex with a CD4 receptor on a cell, revealing the changes in protein conformation that occur when HIV invades a luckless cell. It’s really great stuff, with fantastic pictures - Nature subscribers can read the paper itself at this link.

Great stuff, but sadly not terribly well attended, perhaps because the meeting room was tucked away in a obscure part of the building. It’s a real shame, because I’m sure that these talks would have been of great interest to many people.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At the general poster session the other night I was delighted to see the two candidates campaigning for the job everyone is talking about. No, not McCain and Obama, but the two candidates for the president-elect of the ACS. As the biggest scientific society in the world, this is a big job.

As I approached one of the candidates, Josef Michl, I noticed he was chattering to Bob Grubbs (see earlier post). Michl was very keen on sustainability. And this is a broad recurring theme of this meeting. Chemists realise the opportunities they have to help the planet. Of course, chemistry is the underpinning science to the technologies that are being investigated to replace fossil fuels. I can only imagine that in future this theme is going to engulf these meetings even more.

The other presidential-elect candidate had a very firm handshake and free colour-changing pencils. Another Joseph, from Purdue, Joseph Francisco told me about his plans to unite retired chemists and young, keen postdocs to create an ACS-centred bank of expertise. His focus was much more on the business side of chemistry, and in particular small businesses.

Two very different candidates with very different agendas. It will be interesting to see who wins. At the moment I wouldn't like to call it, but the trend towards sustainability gives me the feeling that Michl might just steal it.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You travel a good few thousand miles and the last thing you want to see is your boss (no offence Stu). Thankfully, he’s back in the UK happy that I’m here doing all the running around associated with an ACS meeting, but I just can’t seem to get away from pictures of him.

I went to a talk by Sir Fraser Stoddart yesterday at which he received the 2008 ACS Arthur C. Cope award. His talk was a nice run through of some of the beautiful work he’s done (both aesthetically and chemically). Fraser likes to give credit to his old students by putting photos of them up on slides when he talks about the work they did. The Nature Chemistry chief editor, Stuart Cantrill, is a Stoddart protégé and thus the talk was littered with Cantrill references and pictures, to the point where he was acknowledged, alongside Stuart Rowan and Omar Yaghi, as a pioneer of the newly branded area of chemistry ‘mechanostereochemistry’ — high praise indeed.

Fraser even gave Nature Chemistry a mention. Reaching more people than I ever could in my whole week here, he named Stuart as someone who as the founding editor of Nature Chemistry could “considerably influence how chemistry develops in the future”.

And there was me thinking he was just someone who could considerably influence the time at which the Nature Chemistry editors get their next cup of tea! Get the kettle on Stu!

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Gavin Armstrong at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve spent most of the last couple of days in sessions organized to celebrate 100 years of the ACS physical chemistry division. They’ve been packed with some real science heavyweights and in general, have mixed some great 'memory lane meandering' with new results.

Monday started with Ahmed Zewail (Nobel prize in chemistry, 1999) from Caltech. He spoke about advances in visualizing complex structures in 4 dimensions i.e. seeing them change in time. He presented some very interesting images of ZnO nanowires using ultrafast electron methods and visualizing material expansions related to charge carrier density. The talk was interrupted by a little “cross-talk” from another session. The organizers must have set the wireless microphones for two parallel sessions to similar frequencies meaning that every few minutes a presentation from another session was broadcast over the speakers in our session. The freakiest part of this was when Prof. Zewail clicked through to a slide detailing what is known as the “uncertainty paradox”, and with great comedy timing the cross-talking presenter said the word “paradox”. It was as if Zewail had his own sound effects!

The talk was followed by Yuan Lee (Nobel prize in chemistry, 1986) who described his many years carrying out molecular beam studies and Steven Chu (Nobel Prize in physics, 1997) who gave an inspiring but equally depressing talk (if you can have such a thing; I’ll blog more about this later).

Both the afternoon session and the following morning session were filled with more great speakers including Dick Zare, Rudy Marcus and Gabor Somorjai. It was fantastic to see such leading academics present both their seminal and contemporary work but it would have been nice to see a session in the physical chemical division for young academics, similar to the one held by the ACS organic division, which was a great success from what I hear on the ACS grapevine.

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Gavin Armstrong at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’m going to stick my neck out a bit here, and discuss some chemical biology, even though I wouldn’t claim to be much of a biology expert. Apologies if some of the details are a bit ropy.

This morning, Linda Hsieh-Wilson gave an inspiring talk on her work unravelling the role of the polysaccharide chondroitin sulfate (CS) in modulating neuron growth. Naturally occurring CS is a mixture of compounds, each containing a different pattern of sulfate groups. This makes it difficult to tease out the effects of particular sulfation patterns, but Hsieh-Wilson’s group have made several tetrasaccharides as models of CS, each with one of the different characteristic arrangements of sulfates found in the parent molecule.

They find that only one of these tetrasaccharides (called CS-E) promotes neuron growth in their in vitro studies. Using CS-E as a molecular probe, they’ve now started to unravel the likely biological mechanism of action. It seems that CS-E forms a ternary complex with brain-derived neurotrophic factor and the receptor TrkB. Blocking formation of this complex prevents CS-E-mediated neurite growth.

But CS is a double-edged sword - it can also prevent neuron regeneration after injury. Hsieh-Wilson is now using her compounds to unpick the reasons for this. Her tetrasaccharides weren’t effective substitutes for CS in in vitro models of neuron regeneration, so her team came up with a method to prepare CS-E polymers (containing 25-80 sugar units). Sure enough, these polymers inhibit neuron regeneration, showing that the CS-E sulfation pattern is most likely responsible for the biological effect. Furthermore, an antibody that blocks CS-E activity was able to counteract the inhibition, thus encouraging neuron repair.

Exciting stuff, especially as there is currently no way to stimulate regeneration of damaged neurons. Of course, this is a long way off providing anything that would be therapeutically useful, but just being able to unpick the biological mechanisms that prevent neuron regeneration strikes me as being incredibly useful. And it’s a perfect example of how chemistry can provide tools that answer biological questions.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I wrote a story yesterday about a clever way to make tiny batteries using a rubber stamp and a virus. It was actually from a paper that came out in PNAS, but one of the authors, Paula Hammond is here at the meeting. She is working with Angela Belcher on some very cool viruses.

The paper outlines a simple way to build up a polyelectrolyte system, and coat a virus onto it, then let cobalt oxide nanoparticles grow on that. Stamp all this cobalt-side down on to a platinum strip, add a thin piece of lithium to the other side and hey-presto! A teeny tiny battery.

In my discussions with others about the work, it seems that people have been playing around with viruses for a while now, but we should start to see a lot more practical applications coming out of this tinkering in the next few years.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been attending so many interesting sessions that it’s been difficult to find time to blog, but I’m going to redress the balance now. First off, I just wanted to mention a terrific talk yesterday from John Bercaw, which gave an update on his work on the mechanism of the Shilov reaction. If you’re not familiar with this reaction, it was one of the seminal discoveries that underpins modern C-H activation chemistry. Unfortunately, it’s stoichiometric, but Bercaw is hoping to make a catalytic version that will provide a practical method of converting alkanes into alcohols. That goal is still some way off, but he’s found some promising water-compatible catalysts (water compatibility will be essential) that look like a good step in the right direction. I was particularly impressed by his obviously meticulous approach to research - if anyone can crack this problem, then he can.

Then yesterday afternoon, I attended a star-studded symposium that celebrated the 100th birthday of the organic chemistry division of the ACS. With speakers such as David MacMillan, Ken Houk, Larry Overman, K. C. Nicolaou and Barry Sharpless, this was the must-see event of the symposium, and the massive ballroom venue was packed. Befitting the anniversary theme, each speaker gave their perspective of historical advances from their fields of interest.

So how do you pick out a highlight from such an illustrious line-up? With difficulty, but my favourite speaker was John Roberts, the emeritus professor from Caltech. At 90 years old, he’s certainly the most senior speaker that I’ve seen at a conference. I have a fondness for the history of chemistry, so I lapped up Roberts' stories of his early career, and his reminiscences about the leading figures of the time. For example, R. B. Woodward was described as having three trademarks - he always carried a cigarette, always used a yellow pencil and invariably dressed entirely in blue. Other snippets included the details of Roberts’ work during the Second World War, when he was co-opted onto a project to find a way of extracting liquid oxygen from air at low pressure (because airplanes at the time carried oxygen tanks, which made them rather vulnerable to fires).

Looking back at his project work as a student, Roberts commented that he was lucky in being able to work on several completely different areas. Nowadays, he commented, graduate students specialize early on, and so they miss out on the benefits of a diverse practical training. The solution, he says, is to provide opportunities for undergraduates instead. In this respect, he feels that summer-school research opportunities for undergraduates are essential. Do any of you think that grad students are forced into specializing too soon?

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night was the poster session. It was late, I was jet-lagged, tired and emotional, but I dutifully showed up, if only to get my free beer. As ever this was a really well-attended event. It's impossible to see everything so I decided to pick some of my favourite titles for you to muse over. They show the amazing breadth of this meeting, and some of them actually make chemistry sound, well, really interesting.**

Impact of thermal and nonthermal processing techologies on quality of apple cider (one close to my heart)

Lanthanide pyrone and pyridone complexes for the treatment of bone density disorders

Reinvigorating the chemistry curriculum with Fourier-Transform Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (FT-NMR) spectroscopy

Measurement of the contact angle of a water droplet on a flat surface

Heavy metal accumulation by common garden plants: A chemical and spectroscopic approach

** I'm not saying that chemistry isn't interesting, by the way. I love chemistry, but sometimes it is hard to persuade others not involved in the field.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some people have all the bad luck. I was recommended to go this morning to a session on self-replication. Sounds cool, I thought. I bet it will be busy...

But I was very wrong. Where was everyone? The recommendation turned out to be right, and I really enjoyed Douglas Philp's talks about self-replicating systems, but the room must have had about 15 people in it. I didn't get it, so I asked Philp how come he had failed to pull in the punters. "I was up against Bob Grubbs," he said.

Ah, it all becomes clear. That's bad luck I said. Grubbs is a Nobel prize-winning chemist from Caltech who is a giant in the catalysis world. He even has his own catalyst.

Poor Doug, I thought. Still, better luck for his next talk this afternoon. Nope, it seems the Philp brand of chemistry will fail to reach the masses once more. This afternoon he is up against Barry Sharpless, also a Nobel prize-winning chemist, from Scripps, who has more than one eponymous reaction.

Ouch.

The message to Doug Philp, and anyone else landed with these unfortunate timetable clashes is clear: you're going to have to get a reaction or a catalyst named ofter you. Or you're going to have to win the Nobel prize in chemistry. Preferably both.

Better luck next year, eh?

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks ago I wrote a news story about some work done by Dan Nocera at MIT. He's managed to make a very simple catalyst that can generate oxygen directly from water - so helping those people trying to mimic photosynthesis and save the world's energy crisis.

At the time Nocera wasn't sure what the mechanism was for the formation of the cobalt catalyst. In today's talk he confirmed what he had thought then - that the cobalt gets oxidised all the way to its +4 oxidation state. He was also very confident in the technology he is developing. "I guarantee in under five years you'll see this," he said. Companies are coming out of the woodwork, he says, to develop a functioning, practical system.

Other big claims he made were that in a system based on his catalyst cuold produce enough fuel to run a typical house for a day in just two and a half hours. This is big talk, Dan, I look forward to it becoming reality.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a slight deviation from the ACS yesterday while I finished up writing a story about trees that can absorb organic nitrates and turn them into amino acids. But seeing as in that single sentence I spotted at least four chemistry-related words, I thought this would be a good place to write about the research.

I shan't go into loads of details, because then you might not go and read the story (and I can't believe anyone would miss out on the chance to do that), but the news here is thus: trees, well known to gobble up inorganic nitrogen compounds, can also take up - and use, more importantly - organic nitrates that are the products of NOx emissions and the volatile organic compounds that trees spew out.

It's not yet clear whether this mechanism might actually help to alleviate NOx pollution, and at the same time increase photosynthesis thereby locking up more carbon. If that were the case that would be a very good news story indeed. It looks more likely that this effect is dependent on local conditions. And as the author Paul Shepson told me, even if the mechanism does help clean up the atmopshere a bit, the better solution is to stop the emissions in the first place.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As is traditional for any editor from a Nature journal attending an ACS meeting, let me begin by telling you my own personal trauma in getting here - my plane didn’t have any water in the restrooms for washing your hands. Instead, the airline company improvised by putting out bottles of drinking water for us to use. But I’ll swear that, by the end of the journey, they were using sparkling water in some of the restrooms. Presumably if they’d got really stuck in first class, they’d have started using the champagne.

With that off my chest, let’s talk supramolecular chemistry and molecular motors. I attended a session this morning that showcased some of the younger movers and shakers from organic chemistry, and I especially enjoyed Adam Urbach’s talk, about designing supramolecular binding systems based on cucurbiturils (the name always makes me think of cucumbers, but that‘s probably a problem unique to me). Some cucurbiturils can trap two ‘guest’ compounds simultaneously, and so can be used to hold together appropriately designed molecular units attached on separate peptide chains. This makes it easy to set up two or three binding sites on one chain, which accept the same number of appropriately spaced binding units arranged on another chain. Such systems have previously been difficult to make. Rather neat, I thought.

In the same session, Jonathan Nitschke talked about systems in which a selection of amines, aldehydes and metals react to form a dynamic combinatorial mixture of self-assembling complexes, which eventually reach an equilibrium in which just a couple of products have formed. Nitschke has now reached the point where, for one of his systems at least, he can devise an algorithm that explains the outcome of the equilibrium. Impressive stuff, and I look forward to seeing where this line of research will go next.

But an oscar for cinematography must go to Ben Feringa, who in an afternoon session showed some mind-blowing footage of a dynamic surface rippling with waves, the result of chemical changes in the molecules that make up the surface. David Leigh competed with his movies of droplets of liquid oozing their way up an incline, in response to light-induced changes in the properties of the underlying surface. Amazing. And all the result of rotaxane chemistry.

Day one is over (so fast!) - here’s looking forward to tomorrow.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The meeting is in full swing, and here in the city of brotherly love, beshorted chemists can be spotted all over the place. Quite a sight for the uninitiated, I can assure you.

I wandered into the ACS board meeting this morning, which also includes bigwigs from other international chemical societies today. It was an open meeting, I didn't gatecrash. I got there in time to hear a discussion about what the ACS can do to be more sustainable.

This huge meeting with 15,000 participants (and, bizarrely 25,000 hotel rooms booked), will take its toll on the city - not only because the poor Philadelphians have to play host to these many thousand scientists, but in terms of an environmental impact. Massive rooms need to be serviced, shuttle buses fuelled, conference programmes printed etc etc etc. This is clearly something the ACS feels bad about. Madeleine Jacobs, board member, did point out that the meeting is in some ways a hostage to the city in which it is held. But I was amused to hear talk of virtual meetings as a solution. I am sure they were talking about smaller division and board meetings, because I think the internet would buckle and break if it had to play host to all this chemistry all at once.

But it is an intriguing concept. Will big meetings like this become obsolete as sustainability becomes more relevant to more people?

[NOTE - I am also posting these blog entries and more on the Nature News blog - In the field]

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve arrived in Philly for the ACS meeting and it was after a less eventful journey than the one taken by the last Nature Chemistry editor that attempted to get to an ACS meeting. My flight thankfully set off and landed more or less on time and it was predictably full of chemists.

I spent the day and night cursing chemistry; it’s not the best of starts for a week spent with hundreds of chemists all talking about it. My first problem was at the airport where I cursed materials chemists. Nobody in particular, just in general and to be honest it’s not really their fault. Let me explain: I broke my iPod headphones after somehow tangling them up and tearing their outer sheath, thus exposing the internal wires. Curse number 1: why can’t they make tougher materials to protect my headphone wiring?

After checking in at the airport, I bought some new headphones and wandered off to my gate. This is the point at which I realised there was no way of opening the extremely tough plastic packaging that encased my new headphones without using scissors. How many pairs of scissors do you think there are around airport gates… yup … there are (quite reassuringly) none. Curse number 2 was aimed at polymer chemists who can make very tough, thin materials that are evidently very well designed to protect the encased cargo*.

This leads me to my first session here at the ACS. I went along to hear Krzysztof Matyjaszewski introduce the sessions on Controlled Radical Polymerisation (CRP). He gave a very interesting talk about the current status of research on the topic and affirmed to me how complicated poymeric synthesis can be. There are so many different types of polymers (homopolymers, block copolymers, periodic copolymers, graft copolymers, etc ...) that can be created using this method and the very complex kinetics involved in the CRP process need to be expertly controlled to get the product/properties you need. I’m at peace with polymer chemists now, they may have caused me all kinds of problems with my headphones but the talk this morning showed what interesting synthetic work they’re currently doing.

My third chemistry gripe was with that of my own body. I woke up at 2.30 AM this morning completely wide awake and unable to get back to sleep: the joys of jet lag and an upset circadian rhythm. I admit to knowing little about such things but a quick internet search shows that it’s related to melatonin secretion cycles and mine must be a little upset. This graphic shows that I was supposed to be in the deepest part of my sleep around that time and instead I was wide awake watching the qualifying rounds for the Olympic men’s discus throwing (I must go and have a chat with these guys at the poster sessions this week). This also infers that at about 6 PM this evening I’ll be desperate to sleep, so I must go and squeeze in as much chemistry as I can before I drop off — I have planned an afternoon quenching my thirst for physical chemistry at the 'water mediated interactions' session.

* With the help of two publishing pals from the Royal Society of Chemistry, I managed to open the packaging for my headphones using my house key, my teeth and pure brute force.

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Gavin Armstrong at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Shalom from Jerusalem, where I'm attending the 38th International Conference on Coordination Chemistry (or ICCC38 as it is thankfully abbreviated to).

The conference has only been going for a day, but here's a thought to keep you going: ENERGY.

Quite a big and important thought, but fortunately for the world, some of the world's top chemists are thinking about it pretty deeply. In yesterday's opening plenary lecture, Harry Gray of Caltech talked about his search to find cheaper alternatives to ruthenium-based dye-senstized solar cells. Ending on positive note, he told us he had secured funding for a project involving about 20-30 institutions across America (and BP in the UK). Even more positively, he then told all the young chemists in the audience to go out and make sure that in the future we can make everything we need from nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen and sea-water, using solar power.

And Richard Schrock of MIT (didn't he win a prize a few years ago...?) finished today by discussing his long-standing battle to make a catalyst that can convert nitrogen to ammonia. But what's that got to do with energy, I hear you ask. Well, the Haber-Bosch process, developed almost 100 years ago and still used to create a staggering 100 million tons of ammonia a year today, consumes a whopping 1.4% of the world's energy. He isn't quite there yet, because the reaction is barely stoichiometric let alone catalytic. But he's working on it and left the audience thinking on the problems he (or rather his ligands) needs to overcome. Oh, and that's before you get the necessary hydrogen from splitting water with sunlight...

Don't hold your breath, but we might get there in the end.

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 02:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Greetings from Belgium, land of beer, chocolate, moules frites and organic chemistry. I’m at the 11th Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium (BOSS) in Ghent, and it has a line-up to die for: Hartwig, Du Bois, Enders, Shibasaki, Fuerstner and Trost, to name but a few.

The event kicked off with Erick Carreira giving a full day of talks, covering the many aspects of his work, from total synthesis to hardcore catalyst design. He was initially almost thwarted by microphone feedback reminiscent of the sound effects from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (only louder). For some reason, even in the 21st century, conference organizers can’t get microphones to work properly. But once the sound problems were overcome, the talks were great. There are very few people that I’d happily listen to all day, but Carreira is one of them.

While talking about his work preparing an analogue of Amphotericin B, Carreira mentioned something that has become a theme of the conference - the continuing importance of total synthesis. There has been much touting of metabolic engineering - genetically modifying organisms to produce analogues of natural products - as an alternative to total synthesis. But as Carreira points out, it takes years to work out biosynthetic pathways in an organism, and then to modify that organism to knock out part of a pathway to produce just one analogue of a metabolite. Chemists can do the job in much the same time (or in less time, depending on the complexity of the molecules), and can also introduce chemical groups that simply don’t occur naturally - which is vital for drug discovery.

Carreira certainly wasn’t dismissing metabolic engineering out of hand - he acknowledged that the field is advancing all the time, and that it undoubtedly has a bright future for making complex organic molecules. But we’re also getting better and better at organic synthesis, so there will always be room for both chemical and biological strategies. Carreira’s 35-deoxy- analogue of Amphotericin B was invaluable in helping to unravel the biological mechanism of action of the parent compound - something that biologists have so far been unable to do alone. So here’s to a future of collaboration with our colleagues in the life sciences.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So, the conference is over, but the work of a Nature Chemistry editor isn't. As you might have heard on the podcast, we're combining our conference visits with trips to nearby chemistry departments. So the day after we'd wrapped up DD11, I took the (surprisingly far) journey to Palo Alto on the other side of the San Francisco bay to visit the chemistry department at Stanford University.

This is my first set of lab visits, and my main impression so far is that it's like having a day of one-to-one tutorials with some of the best chemists in the world! I wonder how much you'd have to pay to get that kind of consultancy...?

Another impression is 'interdisciplinary': it's impossible (and essentially worthless) to pigeonhole any of the faculty I met into the traditional disciplines of chemistry. For instance, Chris Chang at Berkeley makes organic molecules so they can interact with inorganic species in the body and then give some sort of physical response!

And so on to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla (nr San Diego). There's a strong emphasis here on organic chemistry/biochemistry because Scripps is a biomedical research organisation. Again, more interdisciplinary work...apart from Phil Baran, who proudly does undiluted organic chemistry. He has a quote on his wall (and on his homepage) from his Scripps/ETH colleague Albert Eschenmoser, the key part of which is "neither biology nor chemistry would be served best by a development in which all organic chemists would simply become biological". I'd like to think there's space, and funding, for both approaches.

And finally...the Berkeley summer visitor housing I was staying in is right next to the university's Hearst Greek Theatre, and on my last night there, I was treated to a free concert by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant (formerly of Led Zeppelin).

From La Jolla, Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Greetings from Berkeley, where I'm attending Dalton Discussion 11: The Renaissance of Main Group Chemistry. RSC discussion meetings are quite different from normal conferences: the speakers have submitted full papers of their work, and a collection of 'pre-prints' of all the papers is given to each delegate to read beforehand. Talks are then limited to about 5 minutes, with around 15-20 mins of discussion to follow. The papers are then published in one issue (in this case of Dalton Transactions) afterwards.

So, what has been discussed? A lot of pretty impressive main group chemistry, including some incredibly sophisticated Al and Ga cluster chemistry by Hansgeorg Schnoeckel. The size of some of these clusters are approaching nanoparticles, only these are molecularly defined - all with the same number of metal atoms. Ian Manners talked about his adventures with inorganic polymers, with alternating P and N rather than boring old carbon.

That's actually a bit of a theme I'm finding: there's a whole host of other elements out there apart from carbon and it's their differences from, rather than their similarities to, carbon that makes the compounds unusual and interesting in so many ways.

There was an interesting and wide-ranging question posed by one of the chairs (Claire Carmalt): does chemistry (and main group chemistry in particular) need applications to justify funding, or should curiosity alone be enough? Most of the delegates thought curiosity was enough, and Chris Reed said that he often answers that question with 'Ask me in 20 years!' He made specific reference to some carboranes that he first made about 20 years ago, but is now using as extremely powerful yet gentle reagents. Someone from Los Alamos (whose name I didn't catch) made the comment that applications demand blue-sky curiosity.

And a final mention must go to yesterday's chair, Malcolm Chisholm, who reminded us of Mark Twain's words that 'the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco'.

Neil, in mercifully sunny Berkeley

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Neil Withers at 04:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Getting to New Orleans for this meeting has been tricky for some - including the student who drove all the way from Cincinnati, Ohio when the airline he was planning to travel with ceased operations. I think I can top that, however...

Myself and two colleagues from Nature Publishing Group flew with Virgin Atlantic from London on Saturday, arriving in Washington Dulles just after 3 pm. After eventually passing through immigration, we collected our luggage, cleared customs and then rechecked our bags for our onward flight to New Orleans - we had plenty of time, it was now just after 4 pm and our flight was due to leave at 5:30 pm. We were then given 'boarding passes' - and I use this term loosely - and told that seats would be assigned at the gate.

After our second trip on the very odd buses at Dulles - I think they resemble what I suspect people in the 1960s would imagine vehicles of the future to look like - we arrived at our gate, only to be told that we were on standby. Apparently in the dictionary that is used by United Airlines' employees, the word 'confirmed' means something completely different from what most of us would expect it to. Never mind the fact that we had just flown across an ocean, we weren't getting on the flight...

Apparently the plane was a smaller one that it should have been and we were the chosen ones sacrificed for the greater good - if only it had been explained to us so eloquently, perhaps it wouldn't have felt quite so bad. I take that back, it still would have sucked. At this point, we had run into Bruce Gibb - a chemist from the University of New Orleans - who just happened, coincidentally, to be flying back home from a trip to Portland. What was he doing in Washington, I hear you cry... well, he had been scheduled to travel via Denver, but United Airlines had kindly re-routed him through Dulles and then bumped him from the same flight that we were bumped from.

Looking on the bright side, however, our luggage made the flight... (although I thought that in the post 9-11 haze, bags could not fly without their owners - can someone comment on this?). At this point, after I accused them of kidnapping my bags, we were instructed to go to the 'customer service' desk (again, another description that has precious little to do with the reality of the thing) where we would have our flights rescheduled - perhaps for the 9:55 pm flight. Well, glaciers move faster than the line we were waiting in, and we eventually reached the front after roughly four hours... no 9:55 pm flight for us.

United told us that they could fly us to LaGuardia in New York (yes folks, that's the wrong direction!) on Sunday morning and then there was a connecting American Airlines flight to New Orleans that would get us in around 1 pm. Only problem was that they couldn't confirm we'd get seats on that American flight, and we suspected that they were just trying to dump their problem on to another carrier. The only direct flight on which we could get a confirmed seat was the 9:55 pm flight on the Sunday evening - getting us in at around midnight... much too late to set up our stand at the exposition.

During our slow progress in the customer disservice line, we got chatting to Teresa, a senior from Cornell College in Iowa, who was due to receive a travel award (a little ironic don't you think?) at the ACS meeting. The catch was, however, that if she didn't arrive by approximately 5 pm on the Sunday, it would have been forfeited and given to someone else. So, the three of us from NPG, plus Bruce and Teresa decided to give up on United and hire a rental car - what's a 1000+ mile road trip between newly formed friends.

We left Dulles just before midnight on the Saturday and hit the road. Bruce took the first 200-mile, 3-hour driving shift . Teresa was charged with the important job of being a chatty passenger and keeping the driver awake while the others got some (rather uncomfortable) sleep in the back of the Ford Escape. She then repeated her entire life story a second time when I did the second 3-hour driving shift.

So, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, lots of junk food, enough Mountain Dew Code Red to sink a ship, and many games of 'I spy' later, we arrived at New Orleans airport, 17 hours and 1133 miles after leaving Dulles. And miracles do happen, our bags were waiting for us and hadn't been diverted to Timbuktu. And best of all, Teresa made it to the ceremony in time to get her travel award - and no one can say she didn't deserve it at that point!

As Bruce pointed out, it took him longer to get to this ACS meeting than any other - and this one was in his home town! I leave New Orleans on Thursday and as much as I loathe the idea that I must fly United (which I will never do again if I can avoid it), I'd rather not have to do another road trip...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're here in New Orleans at the ACS meeting, time is running out to go to the Nature Publishing Group stand at the expo (booth #1247) to get your free Nature Chemistry lab coat.

In return for signing up for the Nature Chemistry and chemistry@nature.com e-alerts - which will keep you up-to-date with all chemistry content published at NPG - we'll send you a Nature Chemistry lab coat. Some samples of the lab coats are available on the stand, so go and check them out and sign up for yours! (There are limited numbers available, so get there while stocks last!).

There's also a chance to win a free iPod, and who doesn't like iPods, especially free ones...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

A quick note: as with most ACS meetings, I came armed with my camera, but this time I'm actually using it. For pictures of the NPG team at (and getting to) the conference, check out the Nature Chemistry group on Facebook... - Stuart

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

If you are wondering why we've not blogged about the ACS meeting in New Orleans yet, there are a few reasons:

1) There are less editors here than usual
2) United Airlines are incompetent

Where do I begin..?

A group of us from NPG in the UK flew from London to Washington (Dulles) and arrived with plenty of time to spare to make our connection on United to New Orleans, we rechecked our bags, got handed boarding passes – sans seat assignments – and then headed to the gate to get our seats.

We didn't get seats.

I'll will write in more detail later in the week about what happened next, but if I do it now, it will be laced with enough expletives to have me fired from this job and never hired for another one, except perhaps to work in Gordon Ramsey's kitchen.

In the spirit of chemistry publishing, however, let me give you a preview using keywords: LaGuardia, Budget Car Rental, Bruce Gibb, Road Trip!, Travel Awards, Luggage... stay tuned.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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)

(ed's note: at the request of the GRC, this post has been removed.)

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(ed's note: at the request of the GRC, this post has been removed.)

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 02:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

(ed's note: at the request of the GRC, this post has been removed.)

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is my final blog from the RSC symposium on synthesis in organic chemistry, and it’s been great. The undoubted highlight came last night, when Ian Fleming (now an emeritus professor) gave a brilliant overview of his career, describing all the influences that culminated in his famous work on the use of silyl groups in organic synthesis.

Starting from his work as grad student, he presented the highs (and occasional lows) of his career with wit and candour. He began his working life in the 1950s, at a time when state-of-the-art spectroscopy meant IR and combustion analysis was often the linchpin of your analytical data. NMR had only just been invented and was only to be used “if you were desperate”, as he put it. And if you did get an NMR, you needed good eyesight, because the resulting spectra were smaller than dollar bills. Even a couple of decades later, 10 g of sample were still required for a carbon-13 NMR experiment.

It was a fascinating story, peppered with amusing anecdotes – for example, as a grad student, he had to cover all his samples with watch glasses, to stop his PhD supervisor from absent-mindedly tipping ash into them from his pipe. And it was fascinating to get the inside story of some of the historic achievements in organic chemistry – such as Woodward’s synthesis of vitamin B12.

Fleming spoke for 90 minutes and was rewarded with a standing ovation – not something that I’ve ever seen before at a chemistry conference. It was an evocative description of a bygone era, delivered by one of the last remaining gentleman chemists, and I felt privileged to witness it.

So, thumbs up to Cambridge. The next meeting in this series will be in two years time – I heartily recommend it, and I hope I’ll see you all there!

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

WARNING! This blog entry contains a joke with chemical content! Those of a nervous disposition may want to look away.

For those who didn’t read my last entry, I’m currently at an RSC symposium on organic chemistry, held in Cambridge (UK, not MA). It’s traditional for UK conferences to be held at universities, apparently so the delegates can be shocked at the quality of the food. Last night was particularly cruel, because all the tables were laid out with wine glasses, creating an expectation of alcohol. Sadly, no wine was actually forthcoming, so the delegates had to face the evening lecture unfortified.

Still, we’ve had some cracking talks. Today, Varinder Aggarwal presented some powerful chemistry for homologating boronic esters; this allows carbon chains to be ‘grown’ with control over the relative and absolute stereochemistry. This work has yet to be published, but he reckons the paper will be ready later this year - so keep your eyes peeled.

Shu Kobayashi discussed various topics in catalysis, ranging from scandium complexes that enable carbon-carbon bond formations to be performed in water (click here for an example), to lab-on-a-chip hydrogenations that are performed in channels coated with polymer-encapsulated palladium. And Dean Toste gave an overview of his work on gold catalysis – a truly amazing lecture, delivered with such aplomb and rapidity that it was difficult to tell when he drew breath.

So who told the chemistry joke? It was Amos B. Smith III, at the evening lecture last night. Dithiane groups feature heavily in his work, and he was questioned about the best way of removing them. This prompted the following gag:

Why are there 32 methods for removing dithianes?
Because none of them work…

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I don’t seem to be having much luck at conferences recently. At the ACS meeting in Chicago earlier this year, I was given a hotel room without a bed. Yesterday, I turned up for an RSC symposium on organic synthesis and there wasn't even a room for me. At this rate, I’m assuming that when I arrive in Boston for the autumn ACS meeting I’ll discover that my hotel doesn’t exist.

Anyway, once the small issue of my accommodation was sorted out, I had a fun evening catching up with some familiar faces until very late in the night. I’m now experiencing that familiar conference feeling of being very tired but totally wired on coffee.

The lectures this morning kicked off in fine style with Steve Davies. You could hear the scratching of pens on paper coming from all around as he described lots of useful synthetic organic chemistry reactions (including an amazingly stereoselective variant of the Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons reaction – I’ll post the details of the paper once it gets published). Incidentally, I’ve commented before that chemists often seem to have splendid hair, but Steve’s must surely win all the prizes…

Another highlight was Ben List’s talk on new strategies in organocatalysis, including some very neat ideas on chiral Bronsted acid cataysis using phosphoric acid derivatives – see this paper for an example. Contributing to the truly international flavour of the symposium, Goverdhan Mehta from the Indian Institute of Science presented some of his total syntheses of biologically active natural products. Worryingly, he began by defending total synthesis, which he thinks is being marginalized – does anyone agree with him?

OK, that’s plenty for now, but I’ll update you on other interesting stuff tomorrow.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

(Editor's note: at the request of the GRC, this post has been removed.)

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 11:32 AM | 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 (0)

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 (0)

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 (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

And so, Viszontlátásra from Budapest!

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

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

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

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

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

- The Seine is filled with caffeine and pain relievers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’ve just gotten home from the 20th Protein Society meeting in San Diego where, I have to say, I was completely overwhelmed by the quality of the talks I saw. I was also overwhelmed by the beautiful weather, and I frequently found myself asking why I (and everyone, in fact) don’t move to San Diego immediately. One thing that could be keeping people away is the creepy way that the hotel staff use your name when you’re wearing your nametag (‘Here’s your hot chocolate, Catherine!’ … Augh!).

Unlike some of Hollywood's recent offerings, there were several movies that got my attention during the meeting. One was in a talk by Ron Milo, who is incorporating fluorescent proteins into human genes with retroviruses to monitor what individual proteins are doing and, on a larger scale, assess variability in a population of cells. While not really movies, both Vijay Pande and Dave Baker gave demonstrations of their community-based computational projects, Folding@home and Rosetta@home. While I'm familiar with Baker's work in protein design, this was my first time seeing him talk; all I can say is that I'm starting a countdown to when he wins the Nobel Prize. Pande's talk on protein folding assessed by multiple short simulations instead of one long computational run impressed as well in his acceptance of the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award. Tim Springer never fails to entertain with his integrin signaling interpretive dance (to clarify: he's not the one dancing). I've seen the movie before on his web page, but seeing it in the context of the whole talk was excellent. Finally, Barbara Imperiali demonstrated the power of caged phosphorylation sites in preventing/facilitating cell migration.

As a result, I would like to send this letter on to all involved in the movie enterprise (or at least the recent offering from Samuel Jackson and company):

Dear Hollywood,
I think you can do better.

Sincerely,
Catherine Goodman (Assistant Editor at Nature Chemical Biology)

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