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

  Clicked DNA: From Lab Curiosity to Analytical Technique

  21 May, 2018

  I’ve written a few times about an odd sort of unnatural DNA sequence, where some of the nucleotides are connected via “click” triazole units rather than the traditional polyphosphate backbone. I remember wondering what the chemical biology community would make out of these things, and I wanted to report on at least one ingenious a… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Chiral Separations With Magnets. No, For Real.

  17 May, 2018

  Now here is something I didn’t expect: what may well be a completely new way to separate enantiomers, not based in any way on shape recognition versus another chiral substance. [Quick background for those not in the field: a great many three-dimensional molecules can exist in right-handed and left-handed mirror-image forms (enantiomers), exac… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  A New Method to Weigh Biomolecules

  10 May, 2018

  I’m always happy when a new analytical technique is worked out, especially one that’s applicable to biological binding assays, doesn’t require labeling of the species involved, and is orthogonal to the existing methods. We need all the reality checks we can get, and this one (reported by a large multinational team led out of Oxfor… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Mirror Proteins Come Through

  19 April, 2018

  You know, chemistry is kind of a big field. I say that because I’ve been actively reading the chemical literature for over thirty years now, and I still keep running across topics that I never knew existed. One of these popped up the other day: racemic protein crystallography. Now there may be a few readers… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  More on Crystal Formation (This Time With Proteins)

  5 April, 2018

  I realize that I was just talking about crystal formation here the other day, but there’s yet more news in the area, and it comes in the fiendishly difficult area of protein crystallography. All you have to do to appreciate the horrors of this field is to step into a lab that does it for… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  AFM Marches On

  27 March, 2018

  We must be getting close to the future that people have been foreseeing, because here’s a whole review on the topic of using atomic force microscopy to elucidate structures. It’s from the IBM Zürich group that has pioneered so much work in this area. Over just the time I’ve been writing this blog, that idea… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  New Instruments, New Ideas

  21 March, 2018

  Let’s head off to the outer limits of current imaging technology. Two recent papers do exactly that, and I’m going to propose combining them for even more instrumental craziness. The first covers a class of cellular structure that I had no idea even existed, even though it’s been studied for many years: bacterial gas vesicles. Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Way Down There in the Pores

  23 February, 2018

  Let’s get physical-organic. A big topic of research in recent years has been the properties of liquids and solids under boundary conditions. By that sweeping statement, I mean questions such as “When does a small cluster of metal atoms start to act like a small piece of bulk metal? Why is there a transition, and… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  Calcium Probe Problems

  16 February, 2018

  Fluorescent dyes and probes are wonderful things, and they have been absolutely crucial to our understanding of cellular biology. Being able to see specific protein types and cellular structures in real time through a microscope with dyes, being able to monitor things like calcium flux, oxidative stress, pH and so on through fluorescent probe molec… Read More

• Analytical Chemistry

  PAINs by X-Ray

  13 February, 2018

  It’s safe to say that the concept of “pan-assay interference compounds” evokes some strong feelings in medicinal chemists. And those feelings run in several directions: some people are very glad to have a tool with which to winnow down their screening hit lists (or at least to prioritize them), while others are infuriated by the… Read More