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.
There’s no way, as a chemist and telescope owner, that I could let this story go by. A new paper reports mass spec data from ice grains that have been sprayed from Saturn’s moon Enceladeus, and let’s just say that there’s a lot of stuff in them. Enceladeus and Europa (a broadly similar moon around… Read More
We’re going far afield for chemistry news this morning: all the way to Mars. As many readers will have seen, there’s some very interesting (and long-awaited) news – deposits of organic compounds have been conclusively identified. (Here’s the paper, free full text). This really is of great importance, for several reasons, and… Read More
I wrote here a few years ago about the Mysterious Sparteine Shortage, and it’s a problem that hasn’t gone away. Sparteine, for those who collect neither alkaloids nor asymmetric organic chemistry routes, is a naturally occurring compound (found in a South American species of lupine, among other places), and it’s also an interestin… Read More
It’s probably not surprising, but you would be hard pressed to find an area that’s full of more intractable arguments than origin-of-life studies. There are so many theories, because it’s relatively easy to add new ones, and it’s difficult to impossible to put many of them to the real test. Meanwhile, the scientific stakes a… Read More
Did it have to be this way? I mean all of it – biochemistry, the molecules of life. More specifically, as proteins evolve and change, how many paths could they have taken that would have taken them to the same sorts of function? That’s a pretty hard question to answer, since we’re looking at a… Read More
Here’s a paper that probably doesn’t have much relevance out here in the real world, but illustrates some of the problems that we do face. Everyone remembers the Miller-Urey experiment, where a mixture of “primordial” gases (water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen) was subjected to repeated electric sparks and heat in a closed ve… Read More
I’ve been meaning to say something about these chemistry results from the ongoing Rosetta comet mission, and my plans to attend this astronomy get-together this weekend have brought them to mind again. (Here are the papers from the Rosetta team themselves). Note the variety of small organic molecules that this (ordinary) comet contains, and c… Read More
You may have seen stories about this paper, which shows that the protoplanetary disk around a (very) young star system is full of HCN, acetonitrile, and other CN-containing compounds. Studies of comets in our own system suggest that these were common materials in our early solar nebula, and this observation strongly suggests that our own… Read More
For many years, enzymes were thought to be basically the only biological catalyst molecules out there. Then things like ribozymes were discovered, and it was appreciated that the nucleic acid polymers could also bind substrates and catalyze their reactions. That brought up a natural question: what other sorts of complex polymers might be able to… Read More
I enjoyed this article in Science about looking for hidden types of life. There are, of course, plenty of microorganisms that can’t be cultured (this has been known for a long time). And there are plenty of odd DNA sequences that are pulled out of environmental samples, corresponding to undescribed bacteria and archaea. But what… Read More
