- This is a worthwhile new paper on the use of a general Large Language Model (LLM) for generating chemical analog ideas, and it’s definitely one of the most believable of its kind that I’ve seen. Readers will know that I have developed a reputation as an AI skeptic, but I prefer to think of myself as an “AI realist”. And there are thus aspects of this paper that I can see working out in a useful way. The authors are […]
- There are people (and companies) out there who feel that the immuno-oncology boom has run its course and that there are far fewer good opportunities out there than there were a few years ago. Well, I’m not putting my own money on the line, so perhaps that gives me a different perspective, but I don’t quite get the lack of enthusiasm. Oncology is hard, immunology is hard, so the combination of the two is going to be. . .guess what. […]
- This morning’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry is one that’s been anticipated for several years now: it goes to Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto, Richard Robson of Melbourne, and Omar Yaghi of Berkeley for metal-organic frameworks. So what’s a MOF? This goes back to the idea of “coordination chemistry”, a huge topic in the inorganic and metal-organic fields. That’s the ability of metal ions (pretty much all of them, across different elements and in different oxidation states) to interact with organic chemistry […]
- There’s a lot of interest – heck there has always been a lot of interest – in getting results from assays that more closely match what you get from living creatures. And it’s not easy. A prime example has been liver function (and its evil flip side, liver tox). You can biopsy animal livers (and even human ones, ouch) all you want and get piles of hepatocytes fresh from the source. But when you culture them in vitro, they rapidly […]
- It’s Nobel Week again, and we lead off 2025 with the prize in Medicine/Physiology going to Mary Brunkow (at the Institute for Systems Biology), Fred Ramsdell (at Sonoma Biotherapeutics) and Shimon Sakaguchi (Osaka Univ.) They’re being recognized for their work in the late 1990s and early 2000s that led to the realization that there were such things as regulatory T cells, which are now often referred to by aficionados as “T-regs”. So what are these cells, and why is their […]
- I’ve been traveling, so I want to take the opportunity to catch up with all the acetaminophen/paracetamol/Tylenol stuff the Trump administration has been connecting to autism. As everyone will have heard, HHS and the White House are claiming that exposure to the drug during pregnancy is a cause for the rising incidence of autism diagnoses over the last few decades. Let’s dispose of that one right here in the first paragraph: there is no good evidence supporting such a causal […]
- I'll be taking a brief break here – there might be a new post late next week, but we'll see! If not, then look for things to resume on Monday the 6th. Nothing bad, nothing big, just a lot going on at once. I'll see everyone shortly!
- This is a sort of paper that you don’t see too much if you most read chemistry and biology journals. It’s not presenting lab results in either of those fields per se, but asking what it means to be a chemist at all. It’s quite interesting, but I do have to raise an immediate point before discussing the rest of the work: it’s based on an in-depth survey of ideas and attitudes among chemists in both academia and industry, early- […]
- Ah, RNA. As one frequently hears, it’s gradually taking over more and more territory in cell biology as we find more and more types of the stuff and more functions for each type. That process is nowhere near finished, you’d have to assume, and this paper makes that argument as well. It’s a look at the general class of RNA-binding proteins, which many years ago was a fairly short list that has now grown to at least a thousand members. […]
- I’ve never been on the receiving end of the sorts of manuscript peer reviews detailed in this article, but I know for sure that they’re out there. Examples shown include things like “This manuscript was not worth my time so I did not read it and recommend rejection”, “What the authors have done is an insult to science” and “This young lady is lucky to have been mentored by the leading men in the field”. Completely unacceptable. The point of […]
- I wrote here a few years ago about the idea of completely enantiomeric “mirror proteins”, in the context of how they could benefit crystallography. These of course are made up of mirror-image enantiomers of the individual amino acids, but are otherwise the same (and cannot be differentiated by “non-chiral” means – they have the same molecular weights and other large-scale properties). There’s been more talk (and worry) in the last few years about the possibility of extending this idea to […]
- Biocentury has a story on a legislative move that I haven’t seen anyone else covering. The House of Representatives recently passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and an amendment was added to it incorporated the terms of the Securing American Funding and Expertise From Adversarial Research Exploitation (SAFE) Act. That one would bar any federal funding for researchers who work with institutions that are deemed “hostile foreign entities”. What might those be, you ask? Well, most […]
- Mycobacteria, I think I can say without fear of contradiction, are a real pain in the behind, scientifically speaking. Don’t get me wrong: bacteria in general are no fun to develop drugs against. Whatever fun was available in that area drained away by the early 1970s at the latest as the major classes of antibiotics were discovered and as the bacteria themselves set about busily developing resistance to them. The rate of drug discovery in the area has famously slowed […]
- Lifespan studies in model organisms are tricky. And at first glance – if you’ve never messed around with anything like this – you might not think so. I mean, did the yeast/flies/mice/rats/aardvarks/Burmese pythons live longer, or not? If you do a large enough sample and make sure that all the other conditions match as closely as possible, you should indeed be able to say that. It’s work, for sure, but the tricky part comes afterwards: trying the explain why you […]
- There are some astrobiology headlines today around this paper from a large team working with the Perseverance rover on Mars. It’s all about a particular sampling region, a valley that has been carved into the wall of Jezero Crater. It’s even more focused on a particular outcrop in this area, nicknamed “Bright Angel” because of its distinct tone as compared to its surroundings. Close examination of this showed it to be some variety of mudstone, a sedimentary rock made of […]
- The journal Organic Process Research and Development has been running some really enjoyable “lessons learned” papers, and this one will resonate with an awful lot of folks who have done bench-level organic chemistry. As befits the journal, it’s all on a much larger scale than many of of will have experienced, but yes indeed, the title alone will be enough to bring on grimaces of recognition: “Recovery of a Peptide Intermediate from a Reaction Mixture Contaminated with a Large Quantity […]
- I wrote here a few years ago on the initial reports of glycosylated RNA species. Since then there has been quite a bit of work in this area, although it’s safe to say that it started out with a goodly amount of skepticism about whether these species were really there. But in the years since, follow-up work has provided evidence that they are, and that they’re displayed on the outer surfaces of many cell types, and this display may well […]
- We medicinal chemists know quite a bit about drug clearance and excretion (it's certainly a topic that goes back to the earliest days of this blog!) The big player after an oral dose is the liver, of course, since all the blood flow from the intestines goes down the hepatic portal vein and straight into the liver for processing. And for sure, a lot of liver enzymes (like these and these) then proceed to do a number on our small-molecule […]
- So you, working organic chemist, set up a reaction in your fume hood. You’re using some sort of flask or vial, there’s some kind of solvent in there, starting materials, reagents. And of course a stirring bar, right? Because you pretty much always stir your reactions, even when all the components are in solution right from the start – right? Why exactly do we do that? It just feels wrong not to have a reaction mixture stirring somehow. If there’s […]
- I’ve written here several times about the spring of 1989, when I was on my post-doc in what was then West Germany, and when the Pons and Fleischmann “cold fusion” story broke in the Financial Times newspaper. I heard about this in a radio news report and immediately went to the Darmstadt train station where I knew I could buy a copy of the newspaper, and I still have it today (the pink FT newsprint has darkened over the years!) […]
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