Ciliobrevins: Digging Into Cell Biology
Back in 2009 I wrote about a paper that found a number of small (and ugly) molecules which affected the Hedgehog signaling pathway. At the time, I asked if anyone had done any selectivity studies with...
View ArticleEurope Wants Some of That Molecular Library Action
We've talked about the NIH's Molecular Libraries Initiative here a few times, mostly in the context of whether it reached its goals, and what might happen now that it looks as if it might go away...
View ArticleBiomarker Caution
After that news of the Stanford professor who underwent just about every "omics" test known, I wrote that I didn't expect this sort of full-body monitoring to become routine in my own lifetime: It's a...
View ArticlePublic Domain Databases in Medicinal Chemistry
Here's a useful overview of the public-domain medicinal chemistry databases out there. It covers the big three databases in detail: BindingDB (quantitative binding data to protein targets). ChEMBL...
View ArticleJust How Do Enzymes Work?
How do enzymes work? People have been trying to answer that, in detail, for decades. There's no point in trying to do it without running down all those details, either, because we already know the...
View ArticleDatabases and Money
The NIH has been cutting back on its funding (via the National Libraries of Medicine) for a number of external projects. One of those on the chopping block is the Biological Magnetic Resonance Bank...
View ArticleENCODE And What It All Means
You'll have heard about the massive data wave that hit (30 papers!) courtesy of the ENCODE project. That stands for Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, and it's been a multiyear effort to go beyond the bare...
View ArticleThe 2012 Nobel In Chemistry. Yes, Chemistry.
A deserved Nobel? Absolutely. But the grousing has already started. The 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has gone to Bob Lefkowitz (Duke) and Brian Kobilka (Stanford) for GPCRs, G-protein coupled...
View ArticlePicosecond Protein Watching
We're getting closer to real-time X-ray structures of protein function, and I think I speak for a lot of chemists and biologists when I say that this has been a longstanding dream. X-ray structures,...
View ArticleSue the Nobel Committee. Yeah, That'll Work.
Rongxiang Xu is upset with this year's Nobel Prize award for stem cell research. He believes that work he did is so closely related to the subject of the prize that. . .he wants his name on it? No,...
View ArticleThe Last Thing a Professor Wants to Hear
This can't be good. A retraction in PNAS on some RNA-driven cell death research from a lab at Caltech: Anomalous experimental results observed by multiple members of the Pierce lab during follow-on...
View ArticleReactive Oxygen Species Are Your Friends!
The line under James Watson's name reads, of course, "Co-discoverer of DNA's structure. Nobel Prize". But it could also read "Provocateur", since he's been pretty good at that over the years. He seems...
View ArticleAnother Reactive Oxygen Paper
Picking up on that reactive oxygen species (ROS) business from the other day (James Watson's paper suggesting that it could be a key anticancer pathway), I wanted to mention this new paper, called to...
View ArticleIs Obesity An Infectious Disease?
Like many people, I have a weakness for "We've had it all wrong!" explanations. Here's another one, or part of one: is obesity an infectious disease? During our clinical studies, we found that...
View ArticleFarewell to Bioinformatics
Here are some angry views that I don't necessarily endorse, but I can't say that they're completely wrong, either. A programmer bids an angry farewell to the bioinformatics world: Bioinformatics is an...
View ArticleDo We Really Know the Cause for Over 4500 Diseases?
Since I mentioned the NIH in the context of the Molecular Libraries business, I wanted to bring up something else that a reader sent along to me. There's a persistent figure that's floated whenever the...
View ArticleMouse Models of Inflammation Are Basically Worthless. Now We Know.
We go through a lot of mice in this business. They're generally the first animal that a potential drug runs up against: in almost every case, you dose mice to check pharmacokinetics (blood levels and...
View ArticleENCODE: The Nastiest Dissent I've Seen in Quite Some Time
Last fall we had the landslide of data from the ENCODE project, along with a similar landslide of headlines proclaiming that 80% of the human genome was functional. That link shows that many people...
View ArticleProbing A Binding Tunnel With AFM
Every so often I've mentioned some of the work being done with atomic force microscopy (AFM), and how it might apply to medicinal chemistry. It's been used to confirm a natural product structural...
View ArticleMore ENCODE Skepticism
There's another paper out expressing worries about the interpretation of the ENCODE data. (For the last round, see here). The wave of such publications seems to be largely a function of how quickly the...
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