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

  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

• Analytical Chemistry

  That One Serotonin Receptor

  6 November, 2018

  Serotonin is perhaps the only neurotransmitter molecule that you could find named in a random poll, thanks to its association with antidepressants. (That association is far messier than popular opinion realizes, but that’s another topic). It’s a complicated one to have embraced, that’s for sure. There are 13 subtypes of GPCR serot… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Lab-Made Whiskey, Lab-Made Wine

  31 October, 2018

  Via Chemjobber’s Twitter account comes a link to a really interesting Wall Street Journal story on a chemical approach to things like wine and whiskey (last explored here in this 2015 post). The startup company involved, Endless West, began by looking at the constituents of various types of wine and seeing if these flavor profiles… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Seeing Ethylene

  23 October, 2018

  Plenty of people know that there’s a gas given off by ripe fruit that can itself accelerate ripening in others – the “banana in a bag” technique. That gas is of course ethylene, identified as such in plants in the early 20th century, and the more chemistry you know, the odder it seems that it… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Small Molecule Structures: A New World

  18 October, 2018

  Word has been spreading rapidly about this preprint on Chemrxiv.org, from a joint UCLA/Caltech team. It details the use of the cryo-electron microscopy technique called micro-electron diffraction (MicroED) for the structure determination of small molecules, and it’s absolutely startling. I read it last night, with many exclamations along the… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Blue Light Coming Out of the NMR

  17 October, 2018

  I really enjoyed this paper from Merck’s Process R&D group, but some readers will be saying “Yeah, but that’s just because you really enjoy photochemistry reactions”. The latter part is true, but it’s the sort of paper that we need to help drain some of the voodoo out of all the exciting photochemistry work that… Read More