Natural Products Blog

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.