chemical
Cool Videos: Metabolomics
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Today’s feature in my Cool Video series is a scientific film noir from the University of Florida in Gainesville. Channeling Humphrey Bogart’s hard-boiled approach to detective work, the protagonist of this video is tracking down metabolites—molecules involved in biological mysteries with more twists and turns than “The Maltese Falcon.”
If you’d like a few more details before or after watching the video, here’s how the scientists themselves describe their project: “Inside our cells, chemical heroes, victims, and villains leave behind clues about our health. Meet Dr. Art Edison, one of many metabolomics PIs who are on the case. Their quest? To tail and fingerprint small molecules, called metabolites, which result from the chemical processes that fuel and sustain life. Metabolites can shed light on the state of health, nutrition, or disease in a living thing—whether human, animal, or plant. Funded by National Institutes of Health grant U24DK097209, the University of Florida Southeast Center for Integrated Metabolomics is sleuthing through these cellular secrets.”
Drug Designer’s Cup of Tea
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Medicinal chemists are the molecular architects of the drug development world—they do whatever it takes to design and build compounds with therapeutic potential. They are precise, they handle toxic chemicals under extreme conditions, they are continuously developing new structures, and they don’t rest until the job is done.
These chemists begin with an organic chemical “scaffold” (generally made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and a few other atoms) and then tinker; they often create hundreds of incrementally different versions of the same structure, adding a side chain of additional atoms here or there, to improve the potency or selectivity of the drug. It is painstaking, costly research.
That’s why the new “toolkit” developed by NIH-supported researchers at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, and featured in the November 28th issue of Nature, is such a big hit [1]. The researchers have created a collection of 10 new recipes that can be used to modify “heterocycles”—flat, ring shaped molecules made of carbon and nitrogen that are the building blocks for many drugs. The presence of nitrogen traditionally makes these heterocycles very uncooperative—they are difficult to dissolve and frequently deactivate the reagents or catalysts with which they are supposed to react. Until now adding a branch to one of these molecules could take days or even weeks, at the cost of thousands of dollars per gram (just for comparison, a gram of gold is currently worth about $55).
