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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)