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.
I’ve said this before, but if I had to pick one general feature of the current scientific literature versus that of (say) 30 years ago, I would vote for the ability to obtain data at far smaller scales (higher resolution) and the corresponding ability to more fully characterize structures and species that are far larger… Read More
Here’s more evidence of the power of the MicroED electron diffraction technique: this new paper reports the structure of two reactive organometallic species whose structures could not be determined by either NMR methods or conventional X-ray crystallography. One of them is the zirconium hydride species known as Schwartz’s reagent (zirco… Read More
Here’s a neat paper that’s shown up on arXiv.org on protein structures. The authors, from Yale and Edinburgh, are specifically comparing X-ray crystallographic structures with NMR-determined ones in solution. It’s widely known that when you look at the same (or nearly the same) proteins by both those methods that you see small but… Read More
OK, let’s get reductionist, and let’s see why getting reductionist often works so well. How do you know when your finger has touched something? You feel it – but how do you feel it? Your nerves have sent an impulse to your brain, which interprets it as something having physically come into contact with your… Read More
Here’s today’s weird molecule, for sure. A collaboration between IBM-Zürich and Oxford has reported a new allotrope of carbon, this one an 18-membered ring of alternating triple and single bonds (!) People have been speculating about such structures for years, but they appear to be too reactive to spot easily in the wild. There’s… Read More
In today’s episode of “Fun With Chirality”, we have a look at phenomenon that could be very useful, come out of the blue, and which the very authors who report it have no explanation for. This is from a new paper in Angewandte Chemie from a team in Germany (TU-München) who have been looking at… Read More
The Wall Street Journal published a provocative article the other day, entitled “Don’t Understand Moronic Bromides?” about the proliferation over the years of acronyms in science.(Note the old-fashioned usage of “bromide” derived from the early sleeping pills). And while it’s a cranky piece, it’s not wrong. Read More
Let’s talk crystals for a few minutes. Those of us (like me) who are familiar with chemistry and biology, but who are not crystallographers themselves, will know the broad outlines of X-ray crystallography, and can appreciate its extension to diffracting electrons instead of X-rays. But there are a lot of odd and subtle things that… Read More
Just how are things organized in a living cell? What’s next to what, in three dimensions? That is, of course, a really hard question to answer, but we’re going to have to be able to answer it in a lot of contexts (and at high resolution) if we’re ever going to understand what’s going on… Read More
Like many organic chemists, I find natural products very interesting, since their structures are often things that I would never imagine making (and in some cases have trouble imagining how to make at all!) But there’s a feature of the literature in that area that not everyone appreciates: the fact that a reasonable number of… Read More
