Molecule of the Day

Slentrol/Dirloapide (Got a fat dog?)

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Wow. It's not just anticancer drugs for dogs, there are also "lifestyle" drugs. They think they're people!

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Palladia/Toceranib (Dog cancer drugs)

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:29:16 -0500

A few months ago, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor anticancer drug for people, this month, one for dogs.

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Ribosomal Free Love

Mon, 11 May 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Skip to ca. 3 mins for the magic. Using the dance idiom.

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Dead Horses

Fri, 08 May 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Just as the swine flu story was starting to catch all our attention, 21 horses died. It was like plagues were breaking out everywhere! With a couple weeks' hindsight, people are breathing easier about the pig bug (perhaps prematurely), and we know the horses died of selenium toxicity from a supplement.

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H1N1/Swine Flu/Antivirals Redux

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:17:01 -0500

Let's take a visit back to May 2006. The DJIA was above 11,000 and would continue to increase for more than a year. The Da Vinci Code was in theaters. Don Rumsfeld would continue to look very polished in his tab-collar shirts, but his kung fu would serve him for only six more months, when Bob Gates would replace him, following a mid-term election thumpin'. Americans passed the time by applying for VISA cards which literally allowed them to use their homes as credit cards, with which they would buy granite countertops.

But a specter was haunting America - the specter of H5N1, or "bird flu," which threatened to become a pandemic, just as H1N1, or "swine flu" does today. First, we review a link to a bird-flu era series about antivirals and second, a few good links relating to the present situation.

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NNAL (Cancer pee?)

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:09:04 -0500

There are a number of tobacco-associated compounds that are formed by reactions of nicotine. Cotinine is a metabolite formed from nicotine in the body - it hangs around a relatively long time, so it is a good marker for recent nicotine exposure.

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Any undergrads out there into SEM?

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 09:27:13 -0500

Going through emails, I came across a request from ASPEX to link to a scholarship they're offering. $1,000 and "an opportunity to co-author a poster with ASPEX at Pittcon 2010." If you are an undergrad thinking of applying for this, going to Pittcon might be worth more than the $1,000. You couldn't ask for a better analytical chemistry meeting to attend, and this could be a great place to find a job or grad school advisor.

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NPPD (Freakin' spy dust!)

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Yesterday, I mentioned naphthoresorcinol as a reagent for aldehyde testing. Did you know: at one point during the Cold War, the Soviets used to put a certain aldehyde on American operatives in the USSR as a tracer?

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Naphthoresorcinol (Old-timey tests)

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:27:17 -0500

Before the advent of modern spectrometry techniques (NMR and mass spectrometry), there was a compendium of tests to suss out what sort of things were hanging off a molecule. You took your stuff, added a drop of zombie blood, a splash of bat pee, and if black (but not white) soot rose up, you knew you had an arylamine (or at least had some evidence you did). You still see them occasionally in sophomore Organic chemistry labs, but they're going by the wayside, too.

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More Youtube Laffs

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:24:51 -0500

How did I miss this when it came out? The PCR song:

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Methanethiol (They put that in, you know)

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:38:29 -0500

Sulfur usually stinks. Previously, I've covered ammonium thioglycolate, mercaptoethanol, and dithiothreitol, all of which are used to break up S-S bonds in biomolecules. The S-H group is what does the job here, and where this functional group is found, stink is usually nearby. The above thiols all have some degree of stink.

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Sutent/Sunitinib (Cheer up!)

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:42:50 -0500

Ready for some good news? Just now, Pfizer announced it was stopping Phase 3 trials of a new cancer treatment, Sutent, early - because it was working so well. Typically, stopping clinical trials of a drug early is bad news - your drug is hurting people, or it doesn't work. Once in awhile, if a drug is working especially well, the trials are stopped early and the placebo group is allowed to switch to the trial drug. That's what just happened here. The other good news? It was for pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is often hard to treat, because it often does not present many symptoms early on, so patients are often diagnosed very late. Another treatment for this is very good news.

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Harold Varmus on Daily Show

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:10:28 -0500

There was a nice interview on the Daily Show with former NIH director and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus. Good on Jon Stewart for having him, he got to make the kind of points you wouldn't usually on a book tour. He touches on some interesting points regarding just how science funding works in practice in the States, as well as the broad range of constituencies agencies like NIH have to satisfy.

Sorry, the video is from Comedy Central and, likely, US-only.

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EDAC (Water-Friendly Condensing Agents)

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:40:59 -0500

Awhile back, I discussed dicyclohexylcarbodiimide: a condensing agent that helps turn biological monomers (like amino acids) into polymers (like proteins). People use it a lot on peptide synthesizers for this purpose, where the peptides are made in organic solvents. A related compound, EDAC, works in water:

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Propranolol (Adrenalin armor)

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:30:41 -0500

I just read the excellent Not Rocket Science for the first time. He has a nice writeup of the propranolol story that is making the rounds. Some researchers conditioned some subjects to freak out when they saw a picture of a spider by shocking them while viewing spider pictures. Then, everyone got more spider pictures (with no shocks), this time with loud noises! The fear response to these picture/noise combos was measured by observing the subjects' blinking.

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