Chemical Science Blog

Scientists in the US have developed a sensitive and simple sensor that could be used to detect toxic gases occurring in urban areas.

Gases such as chlorine, sulfur dioxide and ammonia are toxic and are often emitted by industrial processes and agriculture. The gas molecule structures are small and simple, which makes them difficult to differentiate using sensors. Methods to detect such pollutants in urban environments thus require expensive equipment that has to be used in a laboratory.

Eric Kool and colleagues at Stanford University designed a sensor based on the structure of DNA, where base pairs were replaced with one of four fluorescing aromatic monomers. The DNA scaffold gave the sensor a stable structure where the monomers were stacked over each other. Using four sensing molecules in the structures produced a pattern of fluorescence outputs that could be used to differentiate between a mixture of toxic gases.

A combination of three structures could detect and differentiate between eight toxic gases

Read the full Chemistry World news story here

Link to journal Article
DNA polyfluorophores as highly diverse chemosensors of toxic gases
Chi-Kin Koo, Florent Samain, Nan Dai and Eric T. Kool
Chem. Sci., 2011, DOI: 10.1039/c1sc00301a

US scientists have synthesised by a new route a key intermediate for the production of synthetic analogues of natural antibiotic tetracyclines that could be used as potential new drugs to combat the growing ranks of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Andrew Myers and coworkers from Harvard University, Massachusetts, have developed a scalable five step route to an enone intermediate, which can be converted to a range of tetracyclines in three steps. The products are also crystalline at many stages, so there’s no need for purification by chromatography.

The team made the enone by coupling a cyclohexenone with an ester – two inexpensive starting materials made in a few steps from simple precursors. ‘We’ve reduced the problem of tetracycline synthesis to the synthesis of the enone, because from that molecule, you can make completely new tetracyclines,’ says Myers. ‘All tetracyclines that have been approved as drugs in the last 60 years have been made by semi-synthesis – in which fermentation products are used as starting materials – and chemists’ ability to modify these natural products has been limited. We wanted to see if we could develop a completely synthetic route.’

The enone intermediate, a precursor to tetracyclines, was made in five steps by coupling a cyclohexenone with an ester

Myers can now make tetracyclines with modifications all around the structure’s periphery and even in the interior portion. The reaction that transforms the enone into thousands of antibiotics is a Michael-Claisen cyclisation on the left side of the enone, he explains. But it’s also possible to use a similar transformation to modify the right side. ‘Because we’ve got a de novo construction of the enone, we can modify portions of the enone and greatly expand the number of new tetracyclines we can make. In fact, if you think about it, you realise it’s a multiplicative expansion because the expansions on the right side can be coupled with those on the left,’ explains Myers…

To read more, please visit the Chemistry World website or download the Chemical Science Edge Article, which is free to access until the end of 2011! 

The basic components of cells can operate within the bounds of inorganic membranes made from nanoparticles, a new study shows. The authors say such membranes provide an alternative model for explaining how the first cells evolved from simple, inorganic molecules.

Chemists created silicon-based membranes with hydrophilic and hydrophobic properties akin to those of lipid bilayers in natural cells. Nanoparticles self-assembled in oil to form ‘protocells’, enclosing drops of water inside porous silicon shells. ‘What was really interesting was that not only could we stabilise the droplets – which had been shown before – but that the nanoparticle-based shell could be considered as a primitive, semi-permeable inorganic membrane,’ says Stephen Mann, one of the researchers based at the University of Bristol, UK.

A simple reaction to functionalise the surface of the nanoparticle-stabilised droplets prevents entrapped biomolecules escaping into the water around them

To produce the desired water-loving/hating membrane, the researchers functionalised the surface of hydrophilic silica nanoparticles with silanol and dimethylsilane groups. Shaking the nanoparticles in oil and water made them pack together at the oil-water interface. According to Mann, the approach is simpler than chemical syntheses required to make artificial phospholipids, which are often used in artificial cell membranes…

To read more please visit the Chemistry World website, or you can download the Chemical Science Edge Article, which is free to access until the end of 2011!

Some Alzheimer’s drugs work by blocking the activity of acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme that degrades the neurotransmitter acetylcholine to choline. To find new enzyme inhibitors, researchers need to identify choline formation, or the loss of acetylcholine, so they can tell whether the enzymatic reaction has stopped. But, acetylcholine and choline are both quaternary ammonium ions with very similar structures, making it difficult to distinguish between them.

To overcome this problem, teams led by Werner Nau at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany, and Yu Liu at Nankai University, China, have combined two sequential enzymatic reactions with a calixarene macrocycle that binds to a fluorescent dye to make a tandem assay that can screen for new inhibitors. The enzymes are highly specific and only work on one substrate.

The tandem reaction involves a fluorescence ''switch-on'' displacement assay as a sensor for specific analytes

In their assay, they use acetylcholinesterase to turn acetylcholine to choline. A second enzyme – choline oxidase – turns the choline into betaine. While choline and betaine are similar, they have different affinities for binding within the calixarene. Because of this difference, the dye can replace the betaine inside the calixarene. This turns off the dye’s fluorescence, which is easy to detect. If the enzymatic reactions are inhibited, no betaine will be produced and so the dye’s fluorescence stays on……

To read the full story, please visit the Chemistry World website or download the Chemical Science Edge Article, which is free to access until the end of 2011!