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Chemical biology is the study of the chemicals and chemical reactions involved in biological processes, incorporating the disciplines of bioorganic chemistry, biochemistry, cell biology and pharmacology. Chemicals – including natural small molecules, such as lipids, carbohydrates and metals, or non-natural probe or drug molecules – are used to gain insight into biological problems at a mechanistic level.
Ferroptosis, a cell death mechanism induced by lipid peroxidation, is pivotal in tumor suppression. A recent study shows that tumor repopulating cells evade ferroptosis and develop resistance to therapy via subverting a lipid metabolism enzyme.
The Chilean soapbark tree is the source of QS-21 — a valuable but hard-to-obtain vaccine additive. Yeast strains engineered to express all components of the QS-21 biosynthetic pathway provide an alternative route to this therapeutic.
A hallucinogenic compound secreted by toads has served as a springboard for research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. The findings suggest that these compounds exert antidepressant effects in part by binding an under-appreciated target in the brain.
Oxidative damage to intracellular membrane proteins is critical to cells. Here, the authors use a water-oxidizing photocatalyst, generating ∙OH even under hypoxia, to show that membrane-specific protein oxidation triggers pyroptosis via non-canonical inflammasomes.
This protocol presents a metabolomics method tailored for detecting and measuring gut-microbe-derived metabolites using a broad reference library of metabolite standards.
Tandem mass spectrometry spectra contain structural information of analyzed small molecules, however structural annotation and prediction from MS spectra remain challenging. Here, the authors combine the fragmentation tree models with a deep-learning transformer module, to annotate the fragmentation peaks and generate de novo molecular structures from a low-resolution mass spectrometer.
An orally available VHL-ERα PROTAC was developed that showed excellent degradation in vitro. When dosing in vivo, the degradation of ERα was lower than expected, due to competitive binding at the ERα binding site between the PROTAC and a linker metabolite.
Ferroptosis, a cell death mechanism induced by lipid peroxidation, is pivotal in tumor suppression. A recent study shows that tumor repopulating cells evade ferroptosis and develop resistance to therapy via subverting a lipid metabolism enzyme.
The Chilean soapbark tree is the source of QS-21 — a valuable but hard-to-obtain vaccine additive. Yeast strains engineered to express all components of the QS-21 biosynthetic pathway provide an alternative route to this therapeutic.
A hallucinogenic compound secreted by toads has served as a springboard for research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. The findings suggest that these compounds exert antidepressant effects in part by binding an under-appreciated target in the brain.
An artificial metalloenzyme based on streptavidin with a biotinylated Rh(III) cofactor provides enantioselective access to various isoindolones with different functional groups. Rational engineering of the streptavidin scaffold reverses the stereoselectivity, offering an enantiodivergent method for the synthesis of isoindolones.