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The Gibson group report in Angewandte Chemie: Here they probe the accessibility of carbohydrate binding sites in bacterial toxins, exemplified with the toxin produced by Vibrio cholerae, the causative agent of cholera.

Two members of the Gibson group have won poster prizes. Robert Deller won 1st Place at the RSC younger Members symposium (at Uni. Nottingham) for his work on Peptidomimetic Cryopreservation Agents. Lucienne Otten won 3rd place at the Systems Biology Annual Conference for her work on Label Free Analysis of Protein-Carbohydrate Interactions.

The Challis group and collaborators at the John Innes Centre report in the journal Chemical Science on the genomics-driven discovery of a novel polyketide alkaloid with an unprecedented structure. Incorporation experiments with stable isotope-labelled precursors combined with bioinformatics analyses were used to deduce the likely biosynthetic pathway for the natural product. See for further details.

Costantini and collaborators have reported in a special themed issue of Chemical Communications about a novel chemical pathway observed only in the presence of a metal substrate. In solution chemistry, assuming no kinetic limitations, the thermodynamic product is formed independently of the absolute reactant concentration. However, inclusion of a metallic substrate introduces a further variable which ultimately defines the chemistry observed. In their recent work, terephthalic acid was deposited onto a Cu(110) substrate, where, at low surface coverages, 2-dimensional metal-organic structures form. However, with increasing coverage, the interaction between molecule and metal induces the formation of a denser, less energetically-favoured hydrogen-bonded network.

The article can be read .

Costantini and collaborators report on the importance of metallic atoms in Si surface alloys for their use as effective substrates for 2D supramolecular self-assembly.
Scanning tunnelling microscopy is used to compare the assembly properties of terephthalic acid on two Bi-Si surface alloys with different metallic surface density. Results published in Surface Science show that, besides the absence of semiconductor dangling bonds, also a high density of Bi surface atoms is essential to smoothen the energy landscape experienced by adsorbed molecules and therefore promote their diffusion and assembly. More at

Cisplatin is the most widely used anti-cancer drug, and the side-effects of cisplatin chemotherapy are largely due to side reactions of cisplatin with other molecules in the body, chiefly proteins. In a joint publication between the O'Connor group and the Sadler group, it's reported that the anticancer drug, cisplatin, can act as a protein crosslinker which is of use in the field of proteomics. Cisplatin has novel features as a protein crosslinker: 1) it's charged, so it improves the sensitivity of any modified peptides over non-reacted peptides, 2) it targets methionine and histidine primarily, which are residues that are not targetted by traditional crosslinkers, 3) it has an unusual isotopic pattern compared to typical peptides or peptide crosslinkers, which can be used as a signature to flag those peptides which are modified with platinum, 4) it has a fixed arm-length of about 4.5 Angstroms, but has the potential for addition of other chemical moities to extend the arm-length. This observation allows new kinds of proteomics that focuses on those proteins which are modified by cisplatin directly - thus potentially profiling all molecules which are directly responsible for the deleterious side-effects in chemotherapy. This paper has just been published in Analytical Chemistry: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac200861k