Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

By Derek Lowe

Posts tagged with "Analytical Chemistry"

• Analytical Chemistry

  The Electrons Continue to Beam In

  24 April, 2019

  I had the chance yesterday to attend a one-day symposium on Cryo-EM (and MicroED) techniques here in Cambridge. The whole thing was co-hosted by ThermoFisher, whom I gather are having a glorious time selling these instruments and want to extoll their virtues as much as possible, and by MIT. It helps that there are a… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Down To the Single Cells

  17 April, 2019

  This is a good brief overview of a topic that’s becoming more important all the time: analysis on the single-cell level. And as the authors mention, it’s partly a case of wanting to do this, and partly a case of there being no other choice. Larger pooled tissue samples just don’t have the level of… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Vibrational Modes, For Real

  10 April, 2019

  I suppose I deserve this one. Some years ago on the blog, I wrote about my days in grad school having to learn about symmetries and vibrational spectroscopy. Sparingly has that knowledge come in handy since then, but the course is still a vivid memory for me, since that’s the clearest example I had yet… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  A Close Look at Fragments

  3 April, 2019

  Here’s a look from the D. E. Shaw research team at fragment binding, and even if you don’t do fragment-based drug discovery, it’s worth a read. That’s because the mechanisms by which fragments bind to proteins are most likely the fundamental ones by which larger molecules bind as well; this is the reductionist look at… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  A Look at Proteins in Living Cells

  2 April, 2019

  We spend a lot of time in this sort of work thinking about protein structures. Traditionally that’s been the province of X-ray crystallography, later joined by solution NMR, and more latterly by cryo-electron microscopy. Each of these has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but one big split is between the solid phase (X-ray… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Vibrating Proteins, Resolved

  13 February, 2019

  Here’s something that many of us don’t tend to think about when we think about enzymes: vibrational energy. But it’s long been thought that anisotropic vibrational energy transfer (VET) plays a role in both enzyme active sites and in things like coupling to allosteric sites. Getting a handle on that, though, has not been easy… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  The Good Stuff Goes One Way. . .

  6 February, 2019

  I’ve always like the idea of aptamers – as generally used, that word refers to oligonucleotides that are selected for binding to something else (a protein target, for example). You get to use all the tools of molecular biology, which means that you can start out from insanely huge numbers of possible binders and select… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  More Than One, And Maybe More Than That

  7 January, 2019

  Every so often, we medicinal chemists need reminding that those beautiful X-ray crystallography structures of our ligands bound to target proteins are. . .not quite what we tend to think they are. Here’s a post I did on that a while back, and this new paper quantifies one of the issues. You see, what you… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  The Sartan Contamination Story

  4 January, 2019

  There’s a chemical contamination story in the generic drug industry that just isn’t going away. Late last summer, some lots of valsartan were recalled due to detection of N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), and the problem has just continued since then. We’ll get into the chemistry of this problem in a minute, but first off, looking at… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Disorder and Order

  19 November, 2018

  An interesting feature of many proteins is a disordered region down at the carboxy end. The reason for this feature has been obscure: if there’s part of the protein that just spends its days flailing around uselessly, why go to the trouble of translating it? Many of these tails certainly seem to have no defined structural… Read More