Health sciences articles within Nature Chemistry

Featured

  • In Your Element |

    Daniel Rabinovich outlines the story of insulin, the essential drug for the treatment of diabetes during the past century.

    • Daniel Rabinovich

  • News & Views |

    Many of us eat mushrooms, but few of us have probably ever thought about — let alone witnessed — the epic battle of kingdoms that can occur between this delicacy and its bacterial pathogens. Now, imaging mass spectrometry has enabled the identification of a bacterium's potent antifungal weapon of choice.

    • Laura M. Sanchez
    •  & Pieter C. Dorrestein

  • News & Views |

    A series of highly active, simplified analogues of the natural product bryostatin have been prepared. They offer an improved approach for the activation of latent HIV that could, in combination with current state-of-the-art antiretroviral therapy, offer hope for eventual eradication of the infection.

    • Christian Melander
    •  & David M. Margolis

  • Article |

    Simplified bryostatin analogues are shown to potently induce latent HIV expression in vitro. These analogues display comparable or better potency when compared with bryostatin. Moreover, they are up to 1,000-fold more potent in inducing latent HIV expression than prostratin, the current lead preclinical candidate.

    • Brian A. DeChristopher
    • , Brian A. Loy
    •  & Paul A. Wender

  • News & Views |

    Flow chemistry has grown in stature as a technique with the potential to deliver synthetic complexity with assembly-line-like efficiency. Application of flow technology to the front-line antimalarial drug artemisinin promises to revolutionalize treatment.

    • Kevin Booker-Milburn

  • News & Views |

    A sophisticated palladium(IV)-based species allows nucleophilic fluoride to react as an electrophilic fluorination reagent. This long-awaited reactivity will be especially useful in the preparation of radiochemically labelled molecules for positron emission tomography studies.

    • Véronique Gouverneur

  • Article |

    The natural product thiostrepton is known to have anticancer properties but its mechanism of action is not known. Here, it is shown that thiostrepton binds to the protein FOXM1, preventing its interaction with several gene promoters and inhibits their expression. This illustrates the druggability of transcription factors, and provides a molecular basis for targeting FOXM1.

    • Nagaratna S. Hegde
    • , Deborah A. Sanders
    •  & Shankar Balasubramanian

  • Article |

    Oligosaccharides displayed at cell surfaces have important biological functions — such as controlling the entry of viruses — but a full understanding of this behaviour requires the synthesis of such compounds, which remains challenging. Here, two synthetic octasaccharides were shown to have remarkably similar inhibition of herpes simplex virus type 1 infection of cell cultures to the natural oligosaccharide identified in enzymatic studies.

    • Yu-Peng Hu
    • , Shu-Yi Lin
    •  & Shang-Cheng Hung

  • Research Highlights |

    A tiny claw that opens and closes in response to two different enzymes has been fabricated and used to perform a biopsy on a model liver.

    • Stephen Davey

  • News & Views |

    The plant-derived sesquiterpene englerin A is a potent inhibitor of several renal cancer cell lines. Two recent total syntheses have utilized cationic gold(I)-complexes to coax readily available open-chain precursors into englerin's challenging oxotricyclic core with enzyme-like precision.

    • Matthieu Willot
    •  & Mathias Christmann

  • Research Highlights |

    Radioactive iodide can be aimed at specific organs in the body by trapping it inside sugar-functionalized carbon nanotubes.

    • Stephen Davey

  • Editorial |

    Is any experiment worth your health — or your life?

  • Research Highlights |

    A comparison of models for the sun-protection factor, transparency and production of reactive oxygen species leads to a prediction of the optimum size of titania nanoparticles for use in sunscreen.

    • Stephen Davey

  • Research Highlights |

    Specific molecules in the brain can be imaged and used to make a three-dimensional model of the organ.

    • Neil Withers

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