Chemical Communications Blog

Two separate groups of scientists have developed methods to uncover proteins’ 3D structure inside living animal cells for the first time.

It is vital to know the structure of a protein to understand its chemical and biological functions. Scientists usually need to purify and crystallise a protein to determine its 3D structure by x-ray crystallography. Not only is this process difficult and lengthy, it can also misrepresent the protein’s structure, as the measuring conditions are vastly different from the conditions inside a living cell.

Now, a researcher team led by Xun-Cheng Su from Nankai University in Tianjin, China,Conggang Li at Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Thomas Huber from the Australian National University, has analysed a protein’s structure using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy inside living frog cells.1 The researchers tagged the protein with a beacon, a paramagnetic lanthanide tag, which binds to a cysteine residue on the outside of the protein. ‘The measured effects from the beacons tagged onto the protein give away the positions of the atoms in the protein, in a similar way that a set of satellites can be used to locate the exact position of a GPS receiver,’ Su explains.

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A team of scientists has discovered the first interactions between neon and a transition metal. Their discovery opens up the possibility of new methods to capture the inert gas, as well as other unreactive elements such as helium.

Although it’s found in advertising and eye-catching signage, neon is also incorporated into lasers used in the photolithographic printing of semiconductors. Neon is abundant in the universe, but its inert nature means that it escapes the Earth’s atmosphere. The noble gas is also hard to isolate. Current methods involve liquefying air and distilling the gas in a liquid form – an expensive and inefficient approach.

A team led by Peter Wood at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, UK, has discovered that, under particular conditions, the inert gas interacts with a transition metal. Not only is this the first interaction ever observed, but it may kick-start new approaches in capturing unreactive noble gases.

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Chemists mask amines’ unwanted reactivity with carbon dioxide and overcome limitations of amide formation

Chemists at Imperial College London, UK, have overcome limitations that afflict a specific class of amidation reactions, used to produce a range of compounds from drugs to valuable materials. Their simple trick was to add carbon dioxide, which masks the reagent’s reactivity, making sure it only reacts when they want it to.

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