Natural Products Chemistry Breaking News

 ‘Deprotect’ is so soulless and mechanical. Words like the slightly erotic ‘denude’, the jubilant ‘emancipate’ or ‘liberate’ are much more evocative. Even ‘reveal’ or ‘unmask’ create an air of mystery and sophistication.

Give yourself a pat on the back for every instance of ‘Hitherto’, ‘notwithstanding’, ‘inasmuch’, ‘heretofore’, 'forthwith', and ‘unbeknownst’ you manage to include in a paper.

Malaria, a devastating infectious disease caused by Plasmodium spp., leads to roughly 655,000 deaths per year, mostly of African children. To compound the problem, drug resistance has emerged to all classical antimalarials and may be emerging for artemisinin-based combination therapies. To address the need for new antimalarials with novel mechanisms, several groups carried out phenotypic screening campaigns to identify compounds inhibiting growth of the blood stages of Plasmodium falciparum. In this review, we describe the characterization of these compounds, explore currently ongoing strategies to develop lead molecules, and endorse the concept of a “malaria box” of publicly accessible active compounds.

Pdf : http://download.cell.com/chemistry-biology/pdf/PIIS1074552112000178.pdf

Stunning snapshots and posters in pdf.

Roland D. Kersten at Moore's lab describes natural product peptidogenomics (NPP), a new MS-guided genome-mining method that connects the chemotypes of peptide natural products to their biosynthetic gene clusters by iteratively matching de novo tandem MS (MS(n)) structures to genomics-based structures following biosynthetic logic.

Nature Chemical Biology7,794–802(2011) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.684

Moore's lab http://moorelab.ucsd.edu/

Chemists have created an ultrafast NMR technique that can 'watch' how chemical reactions occur in real time.

Real time video of the reaction : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVe0N8VMDTE&list=UUJKnK9XCx8Q2x5sDqV1S0Yw&index=1&feature=plcp

Nature video. Stunning !

Although modern medicine is established in Asia, traditional medicine also plays a big role in people's healthcare and is gaining in popularity in other countries too.

Li-Ning Wang†, Jiao-Zhen Zhang†, Xia Li†, Xiao-Ning Wang†, Chun-Feng Xie‡, Jin-Chuan Zhou†, and Hong-Xiang Lou

Org. Lett., Article ASAP

DOI: 10.1021/ol3000124

Publication Date (Web): February 3, 2012