Chemical tools articles within Nature Chemistry

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  • Article |

    A molecular tweezer has been shown to bind to the surface of a 14-3-3 protein through a particular lysine residue. This interaction — characterized in detail by protein crystallography and computational modelling — disrupts the protein's binding with partner proteins. These findings ascertain supramolecular chemistry as an enticing tool in chemical biology, here towards modulating protein functions.

    • David Bier
    • , Rolf Rose
    •  & Christian Ottmann

  • Review Article |

    The complexity of living systems makes attempts to gain a molecular-level understanding of them a unique and inspiring challenge. This Review summarizes progress in the development of bioorthogonal reaction-based fluorescent probes used to follow the spatial and temporal dynamics of biologically important analytes within living systems.

    • Jefferson Chan
    • , Sheel C. Dodani
    •  & Christopher J. Chang

  • News & Views |

    Sensing neuronal activity using fluorescence has many potential advantages over current methods. Now, by taking advantage of photoinduced electron transfer, fluorescent sensors have been developed that allow high-fidelity recording of neural signals in real time.

    • A. Prasanna de Silva

  • Article |

    A small-molecule-affinity tag has been designed to mediate the selective isolation of G-quadruplex nucleic acids in a structure-dependant manner. This concept has been applied to the pull-down of G-quadruplex-containing fragments from human cells, and the methodology holds promise for the elucidation of their putative biological functions.

    • Sebastian Müller
    • , Sunita Kumari
    •  & Shankar Balasubramanian

  • Research Highlights |

    Contrast agents for highly sensitive imaging applications can be rapidly delivered to tumours by assembling them with nanoparticles at the tumour site.

    • Anne Pichon

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