I must admit, I really enjoy riding the bus to work – it’s not just because of the unusual people you tend to meet on public transportation (though that’s half the fun), but because the rides are long enough for me to skim through various journals to see if there’s anything I want to read later on in the day. Normally there are a few things that catch my eye, and I’ll set them aside for a lunch break (or while I’m waiting for the bus at the end of the day). But my plan to quickly skim through this week’s Science failed completely – it’s jam-packed full of interesting articles, and I needed to set aside a few hours to read through them all.

It’s a special issue focused on ‘Sustainability and Energy,’ two topics that are obviously important these days – it starts out with a few ‘Profiles’ of major players in the field (I especially enjoyed reading the ones on Dan Nocera, Jay Keasling, and James Dumesic) and then there’s a number of ‘Perspectives’ (I’d recommend starting with the ones by Whitesides & Crabtree and Stephanopoulos).

Reading through this material made me feel like (somewhere along the way) I should have had a class or two that focused on the chemistry/biochemistry of energy research. Before I started working at Nature, I hadn’t really been exposed to this topic in much detail, despite taking (what felt like) dozens of classes in my undergraduate days. Those classes tended to focus on ‘pure’ chemistry/shy away from applications, and the graduate classes I took were fairly specialized/on completely different topics…

One of my undergraduate physical chemistry classes had both chemists and civil engineers in it, and I remember that the questions asked by the civil engineers (“Is this why cement dries on the outside first?”) generally annoyed the chemists – is this a clash of the two cultures (i.e., science vs. engineering), or were my experiences the exception and not the rule?

Do you think we are doing enough to make sure that future generations of chemists are prepared to tackle important problems in energy research? Sure – you could argue that applied chemistry is the domain of the chemical engineers and that chemists shouldn’t learn this sort of stuff at the undergraduate level. But shouldn’t we be doing more to expose undergraduate chemists to important topics involving applied chemical research (for example, by requiring chemistry majors to take a chemical engineering class or two)?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

While all of us are familiar with a certain amount of brevity (via acronyms, such as ASAP) in our daily writing, it seems that the internet chat lingo and texting revolution is finally starting to catch up with even me, for whom writing this blog is by far the most technological thing I’ve ever done (even my email software knows that 🙂 is a smiley face!). And now that I’m starting to tell people things ‘BTW’ or to send them emoticons, I’ve been thinking more about what could be done with this shorthand.

What I’ve come up with is labicons. Chemicons? I don’t have a perfectly catchy title, so you all will have to make some good suggestions. Anyway, the point is that chemists don’t have a great way to communicate without spelling out all kinds of things. Here are the new abbreviations I’ve thought of,

\/ = Extraction (or extract)

|| = Running a column

[] = Running a TLC

() = Stir/stirbar

C- = Round bottom flask (look sideways) (this one, to be fair, is not much more concise than RBF)

L! = Measuring something (probably liquid)

ooo = reflux/heating in general (get it? It’s the bubbles)

XX = Crystallize/crystallization

I can’t figure out ‘rotovap,’ which seems like the major remaining thing that chemists stereotypically do.

Now, you might be wondering when you would use these silly things, but I think they will really come in handy. For example, imagine you (as a professor) are off at a conference, and you get an email from your student about a problem in the lab. The whole thing could be wrapped up quite quickly:

Student: My rxn didn’t go. ??

Prof: Did you ooo?

Student: Yes. No XX.

Prof: Try \/, EtOAc

Student: Thanks!

Or, for students who are meeting up with friends for a beer after a hard day in the lab, but work in different buildings:

Josh: Ready?

Stu: Got to ||

Josh: OK. I’ll [] till then

Or, for people in the same lab that want to complain about a labmate without being heard:

Stu: I can’t find my C-!

Josh: Check with Terry. He took all my ().

Stu: Argh…

You get the idea. Well, see what you think (and definitely chime in if you figure out how to say rotovap!). In the meantime, I’m off to ooo my lunch…

I went to visit my sister recently, and her daughter has a toy pancreas. No, really! For a children’s toy, it’s pretty non-descript: it’s similar in shape and size to a yellow squash, but (I think) has a little face on it. Somehow, I am not able to enlighten you with a picture (the all-powerful internet has failed me), so you’ll have to imagine it. Not only is it funny that she plays with it in general, but that she, at 4 years old, could quite happily request it. “Mom! I want my pancreas!” or “Mom! Jack took my pancreas!” Actually, it’s starting to sound like an episode of ER…

Hospital dramas aside, I also knew about these stuffed microbes, which are equally hilarious. I think what’s happening is that someone who feels very strongly about increasing the numbers of scientists in the US (or anywhere, really) has decided that targeting high school students is not working. The kids are already turned off to science at that point. So, they think, let’s start earlier. Get these 4-year olds to appreciate the difference between the Ebola virus and sleeping sickness! Get them to love their kidneys, and we’ll have a new generation of microbiologists and doctors ready to go. Even the physicists have their mascot…

In all this, though, I wonder: where are the chemists? I did find a Marie Curie finger puppet, but I think we need to step it up in order to really promote chemistry among our kindergarteners. The problem, of course, is to identify chemistry-related items that could be translated into plush toys. Individual atoms may be difficult to make interesting, since they would all be quite similar. What about glassware? Wouldn’t every child love a stuffed round bottom flask? I think molecules would also work, but manufacturers might balk at all the little pieces…

What do you think would make a good toy? And, more importantly, what have I done with my pancreas?…

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Looking for something to read while you’re waiting for the rotovap to free up or the PAGE gel to finish running? You might want to take a look at yesterday’s issue of Nature, which has a number of chemistry/chemical papers. In addition to the paper by Serreli et al. that Katharine and Stuart mentioned, there’s a News & Views piece from Steven Nolan on Craig Forsyth’s recent ACIE paper and a paper from Stern et al. that describes miniature, ultra-sensitive sensors that can detect unlabeled antibodies at concentrations below 100 femtomolar (and can monitor the cellular immune response in ‘real-time’).

There’s also a cool paper involving the TRPA1 channel – TRP channels respond to “”https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6966/abs/nature02196.html">temperature, touch, pain, osmolarity, pheromones, taste, and other stimuli," and the TRPA1 channel specifically responds to a range of structurally-diverse compounds, including mustard oil, acrolein, and icilin.

In Macpherson et al., the authors used ‘click chemistry’ to show that derivatives of mustard oil and cinnamaldehyde covalently bound to the TRPA1 channel. They used mass spectrometry to identify fourteen TRPA1 cysteine residues that reacted with iodoacetamide, three of which were required for normal channel function. From a chemical standpoint, this might not seem all that surprising, but this is apparently the first ion channel known to be activated by this mechanism, and I think it’s interesting to see how “tuning TRPA1 to respond to covalent modification by reactive compounds … [enables the nervous system to] directly assess the noxious environment of sensory neurons.” For those of you teaching biological/bio-organic chemistry courses, this might make a good test question – it’s a nice ‘real world’ example of how understanding basic organic chemistry can be used to explore how an enzyme works…

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

I was asked if Dave Leigh’s latest paper in this week’s Nature was all that special after all – Leigh claimed to have recreated James Clerk Maxwell’s famous thought experiment about the second law of thermodynamics and a demon (read the news story I wrote here). But in reality, Leigh didn’t actually recreate the demon, he made a molecular machine that can force a system to go against chemical equilibrium after being inspired by Maxwell. Is that so special?

Some would say yes, very much so. And not just by battling against equilibrium. The complexity demonstrated in Leigh’s system is unprecedented. His machine cleverly traps the ring of his rotaxane at one binding site on the axle when light is shone on the system, skewing the ratio of molecules with the ring on one site or the other away from equilibrium. Easy to say, but the synthesis I was told by one eminent person in the field, “outstrips anything that a traditional synthetic chemist can achieve.”

Are complex systems like Leigh’s the future for chemistry? If chemistry begins to re-create natural processes with mechanical machines, rather than just mimicing natural molecules, what will this mean for the field as a whole? Exciting times beckon.

Katharine Sanderson, (physical sciences reporter, Nature)

ps this is my first post, and while my credentials are being checked I am going undercover as Stuart Cantrill