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December saw the presentation of the 2010 NPR lecture award at the Pacifichem conference in Hawaii. Professor Chris Walsh, from Harvard Medical School in the US delivered his award lecture, entitled “Posttranslational approach to natural product biosynthesis” during the Natural Products Biosynthesis symposium at the meeting.

Professor Chris Walsh receives his award from NPR Chair Professor Brad Moore.

Professor Walsh was selected for the award in recognition of his work on natural product biosynthesis, in particular his work on investigating the structure and function of enzymes. He has written a number of articles for NPR, some of which you can view below:

Structural insights into nonribosomal peptide enzymatic assembly lines
Alexander Koglin, Christopher T. Walsh, Nat. Prod. Rep., 2009, (8),987-1000
DOI: 10.1039/b904543k

Total biosynthesis: in vitro reconstitution of polyketide and nonribosomal peptide pathways
Elizabeth S. Sattely, Michael A. Fischbach, Christopher T. Walsh, Nat. Prod. Rep., 2008, (4),757-793
DOI: 10.1039/b801747f

Biological formation of pyrroles: Nature’s logic and enzymatic machinery
Christopher T. Walsh, Sylvie Garneau-Tsodikova, Annaleise R. Howard-Jones, Nat. Prod. Rep., 2006, (4),517-531
DOI: 10.1039/b605245m

NPR sponsors a lecture each year at an international meeting. The recipient will have made a significant research contribution to natural products chemistry in its broadest sense, and will have published in or have had some affiliation to the journal. The award is open to anyone fitting these criteria.

The 2011 award winner will be announced in the next few weeks.

Nominations are now open for the 2011 NPR Lecture Award.

Anyone can make a nomination for the award. Simply send the name of the person you would like to nominate, along with a brief justification, to the Editor, Dr Richard Kelly. All nominations should be received by Monday 6th December.

The NPR Lecture Award is an annual event which is held at an international meeting of the recipient’s choosing. The recipient will be someone who has made significant research contribution to natural products chemistry in its broadest sense. The winner will be selected by a panel of judges, who will announce the result in early 2011.

Previous winners of the award include John Blunt of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and Jason Micklefield of the University of Manchester, UK. The 2010 winner – Chris Walsh, from Harvard Medical School, US – will be delivering his lecture at the Pacifichem meeting in December 2010.

The latest issue of NPR, featuring five Reviews, is now available online.

Featured in this issue is a Hot Article by Mikhail Elyashberg, Antony Williams and Kirill Blinov. Computer-Assisted Structure Elucidation (CASE) systems have been under development for decades, and in the last ten years that this approach had developed sufficiently to be capable of elucidating the structures of new and complex organic molecules, using a collection of mass spectrometric and NMR data. In this review the authors show how a particular CASE system could be used to accurately determine the structures of a number of complex molecules using 2D NMR data. To illustrate this, they show how the original miss-assignment of the structures of a number of natural products, including cephalandole A, halipeptin A and palominol, could have been avoided using a CASE approach.