Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Blog

The RSC Fluorine Group is celebrating its 10th Anniversary this year and to commemorate this occasion RSC Publishing will publish a web themed issue on fluorine chemistry across several RSC journals.

This web themed issue will consist of a collection of papers on fluorine chemistry and it will be promoted by all the journals in which papers are published. The RSC journals participating in this venture are Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, Dalton Transactions, CrystEngComm, Green Chemistry, New Journal of Chemistry, Journal of Environmental Monitoring, Journal of Materials Chemistry, Analyst, Analytical Methods, PCCP, ChemSocRev and ChemComm. If you are unsure about which journal you should submit your contribution to, do not hesitate to contact the editors of the journals.

The guest editor of this web themed issue is Veronique Gouverneur (University of Oxford) who is also the Chair of the RSC Fluorine Group. Submit an article for the web theme issue.

The web themed issue will be published on-line in December 2010 and therefore manuscripts to be considered for this web themed issue should be submitted by 15th August 2010. Later submissions may be added to the web themed issue at a later date. Please indicate on submission that your manuscript is intended for this web themed issue.

RSC Publishing would like to congratulate the RSC Fluorine Group for its Anniversary and send our best wishes.

2010-06-09

We are pleased to announce Professor Michael Burkart at the University of California, San Diego, in the US, as the winner of the 2010 OBC Lecture Award.

Professor Burkart was selected by the judges in recognition of his international reputation and contribution to the fields of natural products and biosynthesis.

‘The greatest reward of these efforts has been to find our tools useful to others’, says Professor Burkart. ‘This is born out by our ongoing collaborations and by the adoption of our tools by contemporary research groups. This recognition is a testament to the creativity and discipline practiced by my laboratory colleagues, and I would like to thank them. My thanks also go to OBC for supporting our research publications since its inception. OBC has served as an outstanding venue to publish our interdisciplinary, and sometimes unconventional, projects’.

The award is given to chemists who have made a significant research contribution to organic or bioorganic chemistry, and ideally who have had an independent research career of between 8 and 15 years. The call for nominations triggered a great response from the organic and bioorganic community, with the winner being selected from all the nominees by a panel of judges.

Professor Burkart’s lecture will be given at the ‘Directing Biosynthesis 2010: Discovery, Evolution, Function’ conference to be held at Durham University, UK, from the 15^th – 17^th September 2010. The lecture will focus on his recent studies of enzyme identities, mechanisms and structures.

Read some of his latest publications:

Mechanism-based crosslinking as a gauge for functional interaction of modular synthases
Andrew S. Worthington, Douglas F. Porter, Michael D. Burkart, Org. Biomol. Chem., 2010, (8),1769-1772
DOI: 10.1039/b925966j

A strategy to discover inhibitors of Bacillus subtilis surfactin-type phosphopantetheinyl transferase
Adam Yasgar, Timothy L. Foley, Ajit Jadhav, James Inglese, Michael D. Burkart, Anton Simeonov, Mol. BioSyst., 2010, (2),365-375
DOI: 10.1039/b913291k

 The chemical biology of modular biosynthetic enzymes
Jordan L. Meier, Michael D. Burkart, Chem. Soc. Rev., 2009, (7),2012-2045
DOI: 10.1039/b805115c

Congratulations!