Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Blog

We are delighted to announce that Professor Scott Silverman has joined Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry as an Associate Editor.  

Professor Silverman’s lab currently focuses on the development, characterization, and application of DNA as a catalyst. Find out more on his lab’s webpage.

Scott K. Silverman was born in 1972 and raised in Los Angeles, California. He received his BS in chemistry from UCLA in 1991, working with Christopher Foote on photooxygenation mechanisms. He obtained his PhD in chemistry from Caltech in 1997, working with Dennis Dougherty to study high-spin organic polyradicals and molecular neurobiology. After postdoctoral research on RNA biochemistry with Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he joined the University of Illinois in 2000, where he is currently Professor of Chemistry.

Professor Silverman’s recent articles include:

Assessing histidine tags for recruiting deoxyribozymes to catalyze peptide and protein modification reactions
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2016,14, 4697-4703, Paper

DNA-catalyzed glycosylation using aryl glycoside donors
Chem. Commun., 2016,52, 9259-9262, Communication

He has also Guest Edited these recent themed collections

• Biocatalysis: Natural and biologically inspired synthetic enzymes
• Nucleic Acid Modifications

Submit a manuscript for Scott to handle today

Professor Motomu Kanai has joined Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry as an Associate Editor. We are delighted to welcome him to the team and look forward to working with him over the coming years.

Motomu Kanai was born in 1967 in Tokyo, Japan, and received his bachelor degree from The University of Tokyo (UTokyo) in 1989 under the direction of late Professor Kenji Koga. In the middle of his PhD course in UTokyo (in 1992), he obtained an assistant professor position in Professor Kiyoshi Tomioka’s group of Osaka University. He obtained his PhD from Osaka University in 1995 before moving to the University of Wisconsin, USA, for postdoctoral studies with Professor Laura L. Kiessling. In 1997 he returned to Japan and joined Professor Masakatsu Shibasaki’s group in UTokyo as an assistant professor, being a lecturer (2000~2003) and an associate professor (2003~2010). He is currently a professor at UTokyo and is a principle investigator of the ERATO Kanai Life Science Project (2011~2017). He has received The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan Award for Young Scientists (2001), Thieme Journals Award (2003), Merck-Banyu Lectureship Award (MBLA: 2005), Asian Core Program Lectureship Award (2008 and 2010), and Thomson-Reuters The 4^th Research Front Award (2016). His research interests focus on the design and synthesis of functional (especially, biologically active) molecules.

Professor Kanai’s recent articles in OBC include:

5-Position-selective C–H trifluoromethylation of 8-aminoquinoline derivatives
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2016, 14, 8092-8100, Paper

Directing activator-assisted regio- and oxidation state-selective aerobic oxidation of secondary C(sp³)–H bonds in aliphatic alcohols
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2016, 14, 4378-4381, Communication
This article is part of the themed collection: 2016 Hot Articles in Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry

Find out more about Professor Kanai and his research on his lab’s webpage.

Submit your work for Professor Kanai to handle today.

Professor Christian Hackenberger has joined Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry as an Associate Editor. We are delighted to welcome him to the team and look forward to working with him over the coming years.

Christian completed his graduate studies with Prof. Sam Gellman (Univeristy Wisconsin-Madison) and his doctoral work with Prof. Carsten Bolm at the Rhine-Westphalia Institute of Technology Aachen. After his postdoctoral stay in the group of Prof. Barbara Imperiali at MIT he started his own lab at the Freie Universität Berlin as a FCI-Liebig-Scholar and Emmy Noether Fellow in 2005. In 2012, he accepted a position as the Leibniz–Humboldt Professor for Chemical Biology to the Leibniz Institut for Molecular Pharmacology and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

Christian’s research interests focus around studying the biology, function and pharmacological potency of naturally and unnaturally modified peptides and proteins and include:

• Development of ligation and modification strategies for the synthesis of functional proteins
• Bioorthogonal Staudinger phosphite and phosphonite reactions
• Labeling strategies for antibody ‐ and nanobody conjugates
• Intracellular delivery and targeting
• Protein and peptide PEGylation
• Functional investigation of the Alzheimer‐relevant Tau protein
• Engineering of protein‐based multivalent scaffolds
• Metabolic oligosaccharide engineering

On starting his new role as Associate Editor for  Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Christian said:

“I am delighted to act as an associate editor to OBC. Without a question I am very happy about the nomination from the editorial board, especially because I published my very first independent paper back in 2006 in OBC. This new job is both a privilege and an honor to serve the community and work with the editorial team of the Royal Society of Chemistry“

We are delighted to announce that Professor Andrei Yudin has become the Chair of the Editorial Board for Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry.

For the past 3 years Andrei has been handling manuscripts for OBC as an Associate Editor, but with his move to his new role he will no longer be handling manuscripts himself.

The previous Chair, Professor Jeff Bode, passed over the reins to Andrei at the begining of 2015, and this brings his time on the OBC Editorial Board to a close. Professor Paolo Scrimin‘s time on the Editorial Board has also drew to a close at the end of 2014. We would all like to thank both Jeff and Paolo for the many years of service and the invaluable contributions they have made in helping to guide the journal.

About Andrei:

Professor Andrei Yudin obtained his B.Sc. degree at Moscow State University and his Ph.D. degree at the University of Southern California under the direction of Professors G. K. Surya Prakash and George A. Olah. He subsequently took up a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Professor K. Barry Sharpless at the Scripps Research Institute. In 1998, he started his independent career at the University of Toronto. He received early tenure, becoming an Associate Professor in 2002, and received an early promotion to the rank of a Full Professor in 2007.

Amongst Professor Yudin’s awards are the CSC Award in Combinatorial Chemistry, the 2004 Amgen New Faculty Award, the 2010 CSC Merck-Frosst Therapeutic Center Award, the 2010 Rutherford Medal of the Royal Society of Canada, the 2011 University of Toronto Inventor of the Year Award, and the 2015 Bernard Belleau Award in Medicinal Chemistry. Professor Yudin is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Andrei’s Homepage: http://www.chem.utoronto.ca/wp/yudinlab/

Andrei also maintains a science blog – Amphoteros – that aims to illuminate the ongoing synthetic and chemical biology efforts in his lab and to discuss general advances in science, both from the past and present.

Below is his blog following our Editorial Board meeting at the end of last year.

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We are pleased to announce that Professor Dhevalapally B. Ramachary, University of Hyderabad, has recently joined the Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Advisory Board.

The main focus of his research group is to engineer  novel and green asymmetric cascade and multi-component reactions (MCRs) to generate biologically important molecules and natural products in a single step via emerging chiral amines or amino acid-catalysis.

His research group is actively engaged in the design and synthesis of novel enzyme mimetic small organic amines and amino acids to catalyze the fundamental organic reactions in an enantioselective manner.

Direct organocatalytic stereoselective transfer hydrogenation of conjugated olefins of steroids
RSC Adv., 2013,3, 13497-13506 DOI: 10.1039/C3RA41519H, Paper

Direct catalytic asymmetric synthesis of highly functionalized (2-ethynylphenyl)alcohols via Barbas–List aldol reaction: scope and synthetic applications
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2012, 10, 5094-5101 DOI: 10.1039/C2OB25563D, Paper

Observation of neighboring ortho-hydroxyl group participation in organocatalytic asymmetric sequential Michael-lactonization reactions: synthesis of highly substituted chiral spirodihydrocoumarins
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2012, 10, 5825-5829 DOI: 10.1039/C2OB07122C, Communication

Discovery of 2-aminobuta-1,3-enynes in asymmetric organocascade catalysis: construction of drug-like spirocyclic cyclohexanes having five to six contiguous stereocenters
Chem. Commun., 2012,48, 2252-2254 DOI: 10.1039/C2CC17219D, Communication

The Editorial team are very pleased to announce that Professor Margaret Brimble is now an Associate Editor for Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry.

Margaret Brimble holds the Chair of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Auckland, is Past-President of the International Society for Heterocyclic Chemistry, Chair of the Physical Sciences Panel of the NZ Marsden Fund and a Principal Investigator in the Maurice Wilkins Centre for Molecular Biodiscovery.

Originally from Auckland, Margaret received a BSc and MSc (Hons) in Chemistry from the University of Auckland and a PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Southampton. In 2004, she won the Novartis Chemistry Award and the James Cook Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand and in 2005, she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (Queen’s Honour) for her service to science. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry.

We took this opportunity to ask Margaret a few questions:

•    What inspired you to become a chemist?
The creativity associated with making new molecules for the first time.

•    What exciting projects are you working on at the moment?
The synthesis of some really interesting antimicrobial glycopeptides and the synthesis of complex natural products with anticancer activity.

•    You have won a number of awards since the start of your career, including the Rutherford Medal of the Royal Society of New Zealand last year. What is the key to your success?
To do total synthesis of natural products you have to be persistent and work hard. You have to accept that 90% of what you do will not work. I believe that nothing worth doing comes easily. I am therefore motivated by the “bigger picture” and have long term goals having faith that down the track the quality of our science will be recognized. The Rutherford Medal from The Royal Society of New Zealand is awarded for long term contributions to science and technology in New Zealand so this success resulted from many years of hard work with my research team.

•    What scientific discovery would you most like to have been responsible for?
We have a drug candidate NNZ2566 that is in phase 2b clinical trial for traumatic brain injury. We provided the medicinal chemistry expertise for Neuren Pharmaceuticals to develop this synthetic drug candidate. I really hope NNZ2566 makes it to the market.

•    You have recently become an Associate Editor for Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. What are you looking forward to most about your new role?
I am looking forward to interacting with the synthetic community more and learning more about the chemistry people are doing. The world of synthesis is vast and it is hard to keep up with what everyone is doing.

•    What advice would you give to the students who will be the next generation of scientists?
I tell my young students to do the science you like doing. I also tell them to stick to their science and not get distracted.

•   What would you be if you weren’t a scientist?
I have thought about this often but actually still can’t think about anything better than being a synthetic organic chemist! We get to interact with lots of other scientists and have fun making new molecules for a range of different exciting applications – mainly for drug discovery and as new materials.

Margaret’s recent articles include:
The Kulinkovich hydroxycyclopropanation reaction in natural product synthesis
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2012,10, 7649-7665

Enantioselective synthesis of C-linked spiroacetal-triazoles as privileged natural product-like scaffolds
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2012,10, 5993-6002

Synthesis of glycosylated 5-hydroxylysine, an important amino acid present in collagen-like proteins such as adiponectin
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2012,10, 1137-1144