Chemistry.John Dalton

Glycans are essential to virtually every biological process in the body. These complex structures—composed of interlocking sugar molecules—adorn the surfaces of cells in fuzzy profusion. Glycans are a crucial part of a cell's identity, helping it communicate with other cells and with the external environment. Glycans are also known to play a vital role in cancer, autoimmune disease and countless other afflictions. Despite their ubiquity and importance, glycans remain among the most enigmatic biological players. "It is clear that these elaborate sugar structures play critical roles in both health and disease, He goes on to say that science still has very little understanding of glycan activity, because unlike other processes in biology, they are not assembled based on a template. Instead, they are produced by a complex interplay of a large family of enzymes that add and remove specific sugars depending on where different family members occur and other factors. "For the fi...

New patterning technology which could open opportunities to recreate complex biological environments has been developed by researchers. 3DEAL' is a simple and inexpensive fabrication technique able to generate complex molecular patterns within soft matter, such as hydrogels, with microscale resolution and up to centimetres in depth. This capacity enables the possibility to engineer 3-D hydrogel environments with spatial control of the chemical composition, opening the opportunity to recreate biological scenarios such as 3-D molecular gradients or patterns. This could be used to design new drug screening platforms or build complex tissue engineered constructs. "The human body is largely made up of anisotropic, hierarchical, and mostly three dimensional structures. New ways to fabricate environments that can recreate physical and chemical features of such structures would have important implications in the way more efficient drugs are developed or more functional tissue and or...

A new chemical agent reveals hidden fingerprints with a fluorescent glow that lasts for months, a new study published in Analytical Chemistry concludes. The new substance may help forensic investigators identify prints on plastic and metal surfaces, which glow naturally under ultraviolet light and can obscure fingerprints, Chemical & Engineering News reports. What’s more, the new material makes crisper images of fingerprints than traditional fingerprinting powders. That makes the advance valuable for medical diagnostics, the researchers say, because clean resolution of fingerprint furrows and ridges can provide information about a patient’s metabolism.

New research suggests the presence of life might impact how fast a planet turns, Space.com reports. Thanks to the atmosphere’s 50-trillion-metric-ton mass dragging across Earth’s surface, changes to the atmosphere can influence how quickly Earth rotates. And biologic activity that releases gases such as oxygen can modify the atmosphere enough to influence the speed with which a planet spins, the new study finds. For now, the calculations, detailed in a study released on the preprint server arXiv, are a theoretical but reasonable “what if” scenario, the researcher says.

Did you know that the discovery of a way to make ammonia was the single most important reason for the world’s population explosion from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7 billion today? Or that polythene, the world’s most common plastic, was accidentally invented twice? The chances are you didn’t, as chemistry tends to get overlooked compared to the other sciences. Not a single chemist made it into Science magazine’s Top 50 Science stars on Twitter. Chemistry news just don’t get the same coverage as the physics projects, even when the project was all about landing a chemistry lab on a comet. So the Royal Society of Chemistry decided to look into what people really think of chemistry, chemists and chemicals. It turns out most people just don’t have a good idea of what it is chemists do, or how chemistry contributes to the modern world. This is a real shame, because the world as we know it wouldn’t exist without chemistry. Here’s my top five chemistry inventions that make the world you live in...

Have you ever wondered how freshly baked bread gets its golden brown crust and why it smells so good? Or how nondescript green berries turn into beautiful brown coffee beans with a rich alluring aroma? The answers to these questions lie in a series of complex of chemical reactions, known as Maillard reactions, which give many foods their familiar flavors and colors. These sensory properties even guide us in how we choose foods and help create our initial perceptions of their quality. Tastes So Good As the name suggests, Maillard reactions were first described by a French physician and biochemist, Louis-Camille Maillard, in 1912. These reactions produce hundreds of chemical compounds that give color and aroma to some of our favorite foods such as roast meat, potato chips, bread and other bakery products, coffee, chocolate and confectionery. Maillard reactions occur between amine groups of amino acids or proteins and “reducing” sugars, such as glucose and fructose. These sugars are s...

The immune system is the body’s first line of defense when it comes to fighting cancerous cells. It can identify and attack the smallest of threats before they become a danger, and distinguish tumor cells from the body’s normal cells, protecting our essential systems. But the immune system isn’t always successful. Tumor cells have mechanisms to evade or suppress immune response, allowing them to masquerade as normal cells and grow without restraint. “Cancer cells can mutate in ways that make them undetectable to the immune cells. In other cases, a dysregulation in the body can lead to key signals being shut down so the immune system doesn’t respond as it should,” says David Feltquate, head of oncology early clinical development at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Every tumor is unique: some respond well to chemotherapy, targeted or immunotherapy treatments, while others become resistant after an initial response or don’t respond at all. Researchers are looking at the tumor microenvironment to ...

We can cover 10 times more targets than the experts can because it’s data-driven and automatic and objective. Chemical probes—small molecules used to manipulate protein function—are often not as selective or effective as the researchers using them might hope. Now, a resource called Probe Miner aims to give scientists a heads up if their choice is no good, and offer better options. In a study published today (December 14) in Cell Chemical Biology, researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London describe the tool, which evaluates millions of chemical probes based on publicly available data and returns a list ranking the probes in order of effectiveness against a target. “Getting all the data together is a monumental task, but now it’s in very simple visual form,” says Michael Walters, a medicinal chemist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study. “This portal should allow people to be more efficient and effective in their research because it rea...

It pays to know when taking shortcuts is acceptable, and which it’s safe to take Ask any circle of chemists about the major problems in the field today, and it won’t take long for reproducibility to come up. Although not so pronounced as the crisis in fields like cell biology, every synthetic chemist has encountered literature procedures they are unable to match. The most common cause of this irreproducibility seems not to be mistaken product identity, illicit padding of yield, or outright fraud. More often, insufficient detail in published methods thwarts efforts at replication. Admittedly, it’s not always obvious that details are lacking. Unexpected variables such as vial headspace, stirring rate and even ambient humidity can, rarely, impact reaction outcomes. Or an unnoticed contaminant might skew results, as with ‘metal-free’ reactions that turned out to be catalysed by undetected trace metal residues,1 or when an arene fluorodesilylation was found only to occur in borosilicate f...

Can companies rely on the results of one or two scientific studies to design a new industrial process or launch a new product? In at least one area of materials chemistry, the answer may be yes—but only 80 percent of the time. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-materials-chemistry-papers-wrong.html#jCp The replicability of results from scientific studies has become a major source of concern in the research community, particularly in the social sciences and biomedical sciences. But many researchers in the fields of engineering and the hard sciences haven't felt the same level of concern for independent validation of their results. A new study that compared the results reported in thousands of papers published about the properties of metal organic framework (MOF) materials - which are prominent candidates for carbon dioxide adsorption and other separations - suggests the replicability problem should be a concern for materials researchers, too. One in five studies of MOF ...

Chemistry is a very old discipline, with references to chemical transformations and debate about the nature of matter dating back to the times of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. Modern chemistry began to emerge from alchemy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thanks to scholars such as Boyle and Lavoisier, leading to rapid advances in the following two centuries. In this feature, eight leading chemists with a broad spectrum of interests look to the future and share their vision for how their own fields may develop in the coming years. Even though research is increasingly interdisciplinary, the articles are roughly divided into traditional areas of chemistry note, however, the key themes that occur in more than one article, including energy and sustainable chemistry. The chemical tools used to investigate biology - and the analytical tools chemists themselves use - are discussed, as well as the synergy between experiment and theory. Structure and bonding are at the core of t...

‘All science is either physics or stamp collecting.’ Ernest Rutherford didn’t have a high opinion of chemistry. Famously, he was never impressed that he won the Nobel prize in such a lowly discipline. For the man who gave us the proton, those lab benches just weren’t sexy enough. It’s a problem that persists. Last month, a survey of 186 industry professionals by Elsevier’s Reaxys found 78% of chemists felt that the discipline was unattractive because it didn’t make headlines. Similar numbers reported difficulty hiring new staff or bemoaned the discipline’s obsession with applied science as a major turn-off. It’s all an illusion, of course. The daily work of any other scientist is beset by an equal level of mundanity to that of your average chemist. But chemistry holds the unenviable position of being viewed as ‘that required technical fiddly bit’. And too few try to dispel that myth. For decades, chemistry communication has been on a crash course to mediocrity, afraid to take risks ...

In 1985, when Carl Sagan was writing the novel  Contact , he needed to quickly transport his protagonist Dr. Ellie Arroway from Earth to the star Vega. He had her enter a black hole and exit light-years away, but he didn’t know if this made any sense. The Cornell University astrophysicist and television star consulted his friend Kip Thorne, a black hole expert at the California Institute of Technology (who  won a Nobel Prize  earlier this month).  Thorne knew that Arroway couldn’t get to Vega via a black hole, which is thought to trap and  destroy anything that falls in . But it occurred to him that she might make use of another kind of hole consistent with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: a tunnel or “wormhole” connecting distant locations in space-time. While the simplest theoretical wormholes immediately collapse and disappear before anything can get through, Thorne wondered whether it might be possible for an “infinitely advanced” sci-f...

In 1985, when Carl Sagan was writing the novel  Contact , he needed to quickly transport his protagonist Dr. Ellie Arroway from Earth to the star Vega. He had her enter a black hole and exit light-years away, but he didn’t know if this made any sense. The Cornell University astrophysicist and television star consulted his friend Kip Thorne, a black hole expert at the California Institute of Technology (who  won a Nobel Prize  earlier this month).  Thorne knew that Arroway couldn’t get to Vega via a black hole, which is thought to trap and  destroy anything that falls in . But it occurred to him that she might make use of another kind of hole consistent with Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: a tunnel or “wormhole” connecting distant locations in space-time. While the simplest theoretical wormholes immediately collapse and disappear before anything can get through, Thorne wondered whether it might be possible for an “infinitely advanced” sci-f...