Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Blog

Xianzhang Bu and colleagues at Sun Yat-Sen University in China have ‘unexpectedly’ discovered new fluorescent trans-dihydrofluoren-3-ones from one pot reactions of benzaldehydes and acetylacetone.

Find out more on the article which is free to access until the 7th December
Have you ever experienced an ‘unexpected’ synthesis in your lab? You can now tell us by commenting on this blog.

New fluorescent trans-dihydrofluoren-3-ones from aldol–Robinson annulation–regioselective addition involved one-pot reaction
Yingpeng Huo, Xu Qiu, Weiyan Shao, Jianing Huang, Yanjun Yu, Yinglin Zuo, Linkun An, Jun Du and Xianzhang Bu
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2010, 8, 5048-5052
DOI: 10.1039/C0OB00401D

Nominations are now invited for the 2011 Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Lecture Award, to be given at the 16th IUPAC International Symposium on Organometallic Chemistry Directed Towards Organic Synthesis (OMCOS 16), held from 24-28 July 2011 in Shanghai, China.

Anyone can make a nomination for the award. All you need to do is send the name of your nominee and a brief justification to the Editor, Dr Richard Kelly. All nominations should take account of the award criteria (below) and the topic of the conference and should be received by Monday 6th December 2010.

This annual award is open to scientists who have made a significant contribution within the scope of OBC and ideally will have an independent academic career of between 8 and 15 years.

The winner, who must be available to give the sponsored lecture, will also be invited to submit a related article for publication in OBC (which will be subject to the usual peer review process). The award, open to anyone fitting these criteria, will cover various expenses incurred at the meeting.

The winner will be selected from the nominees by a panel of judges, who will announce the result in early 2011.

We look forward to receiving your nominations.

Previous winners of the award include Professor Wilfred van der Donk, from University of Illinois, USA and Dr Akimitsu Okamoto, from RIKEN, Japan.

Tanabe, Nishimoto and co-workers at Kyoto University, propose a mechanism for the intramolecular cyclization of modified oligodeoxynucleotides bearing a pair of disulfides.

This colourful cover represents how X-Ray irradiation of an aqueous solution of modified oligodeoxynucleotides with a pair of disulfides at both ends causes efficient cyclization via an
intramolecular exchange reaction.

The article is free to access until the end of November.

Radiolytic cyclization of stem-and-loop structured oligodeoxynucleotide with neighboring arrangement of α,ω-bis-disulfides
Kazuhito Tanabe, Eiji Matsumoto, Takeo Ito and Sei-ichi Nishimoto
Org. Biomol. Chem., 2010, 8, 4837-4842
DOI: 10.1039/C0OB00275E

Congratulations to  Richard Heck (University of Delaware, USA), Ei-ichi Negishi (Purdue University, USA) and Akira Suzuki (Hokkaido University, Japan), the recipients of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

These three chemists have been working independently on palladium-catalysed cross coupling reactions to make C-C bonds to design new organic molecules. Their chemical methods are widely used by the chemical communities  to develop new compounds and molecules with applications in pharmaceuticals, agriculture and the electronic industry.

I was listening to Professor Negishi this morning on his first interview live from Stockholm and he was absolutely delighted with the news. He was awoken by a phone call that told him he was one of the Chemistry Nobel Prize winners – what a great way of waking up in the morning!

Negishi said that he was ‘extremely happy – this means a lot’.   ‘I have been dreaming about this prize for half a century, since I came to America and encountered several Nobel laureates, when I realised it was not a story – it was a reality which in principle could happen to anyone, including myself.’ 
Professor Negishi, 2010 was your turn! Congratulations.

Neghisi, Suzuki and Heck will go to Stockohlm next December to receive this very well deserved prestigious prize. From Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry we wanted to send our most sincere appreciation and admiration to these three pioneers of organic chemistry.

Read more from Chemistry World here.

In a fast moving subject field, you need your research to be available to the community as soon as possible.

At Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry (OBC) we are working with our authors to make this happen. That’s why you can now choose to have the unedited and unformatted version of your article published shortly after acceptance as an Accepted Manuscript.

This new, free service from RSC Publishing allows you to make your results available, in citable form, before publication of the edited article. Published on the website as a downloadable pdf file, your Accepted Manuscript is readily accessible to the people you want to read it.

Of course, all OBC articles will continue to receive the current high quality editing and formatting service from RSC Publishing’s professional team of technical editors. Once the fully edited and formatted Advance Article is published the Accepted Manuscript version of your article will become unavailable.

Check out these examples of recent Accepted Manuscripts free:

More information about OBC Accepted Manuscripts can be found on our blog.

Wouldn’t it be great to have your research read by your peers almost as soon as you know your manuscript has been accepted? Go online to submit your next article  to OBC now: we look forward to receiving your work.

Bound to succeed for gene therapy

by David Barden

An all-in-one solution to improve gene therapy in vivo has been devised by US scientists.

Correcting the genetic code of malfunctioning cells, known as gene therapy, has enormous potential to cure diseases. However, two key challenges are getting the new DNA into the cell and tracking it once inside. Now a group led by Mark Woods at Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland has shown that these two problems can be solved in one stroke, with clear benefits for the development of new gene therapy treatments.

DNA has a high negative charge, meaning that it is repelled by biological membranes such as cell walls. One way of getting it into a cell is to mask the charge by bundling it with a positively charged polymer. Tracking this process in real-time is highly desirable, says Woods and is currently done by attaching a contrast agent to the polymer – but this can fundamentally modify its properties, he says. Instead Woods and colleagues optimised the polymer so that it already contains a contrast agent, which they say will provide ‘a valuable addition to the gene therapy tool kit.’

Woods realised that a polymeric europium complex that they had previously developed as a contrast enhancer in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) might also be suitable as a transfer agent as it had a high positive charge. Testing their complex out on a stretch of DNA encoding the well-known green fluorescent protein showed that it aided migration into cells. In addition, the binding of the complex to the DNA changed the contrast signal produced, ‘potentially providing a means of imaging the delivery and release of a gene,’ says Woods.

However, he adds, improvements to the transfer efficiency and contrast enhancement are needed before such complexes can be considered as gene therapy agents. Altering the lipophilicity of the polymer, adding copolymers to the chain, or adjusting the charge on the complex should afford routes to more effective agents, he suggests.

Peter van Zijl, an expert in MRI methodologies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, says ‘This work constitutes another important step forward in the design of compounds that can function both as MRI contrast agents and gene delivery agents,’ adding that ‘this proof of principle will greatly stimulate future efforts to develop transfection agents that can report on their efficacy through MRI.’

Read the article and comment on the blog

Polymeric PARACEST MRI contrast agents as potential reporters for gene therapy
Yunkou Wu, Christiane E. Carney, Michael Denton, Elaine Hart, Piyu Zhao, Daniel N. Streblow, A. Dean Sherry and Mark Woods, Org. Biomol. Chem., 2010
DOI: 10.1039/c0ob00087f

Original story in Highlights of Chemical Biology