March 2007 – Page 2 – David Bradley

Could creatine slow Parkinson’s disease?

A North American study is set to investigate whether the dietary supplement, creatine, used by athletes and bodybuilders to boost their energy levels and build muscle could stop Parkinson’s disease in its tracks.

Creatine is already being investigated for treatment of other neurological disorders and neuromuscular problems, including Lou Gehrig’s disease and muscular dystrophy. According to Kapil Sethi, who is director of the Movement Disorders Program at the Medical College of Georgia, it might help Parkinson’s patients by giving the dying brain cells causing PD symptoms an energy boost too.

“We think it may help cells that are damaged or overworked,” explains Sethi. Sethi is a site principal investigator on the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke study. The study will enroll 1720 patients from 51 sites in the US and Canada.

InChI=1/C4H9N3O2/c1-7(4(5)6)2-3(8)9/h2H2,1H3,(H3,5,6)(H,8,9)/f/h5,8H,6H2/b5-4+

Reactive chemistry

Macrocycle The latest issue of Reactive Reports (#63) is now online featuring a selection of the hottest science news and our interview with the new Managing Director of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Dr Robert Parker.

Also in this issue:

Cocoa Has Beans One of the natural compounds found in cocoa, teas, wine, and some fruit and vegetables could lead to a breakthrough in health and nutrition, according to US researchers.

Chemists Go Round the Bend Chemists often think of molecular wires as “shape-persistent” rods with limited flexibility, so says Oxford University’s Harry Anderson, and he should know, having worked with the inflexible nanoscopic objects known as molecules since the early 1990s.

Natural Copy Cat Green plants can extract carbon dioxide gas from the air and turn it into sugar molecules using sunlight and give off oxygen. Now, a catalyst could help us do the same.

Waste Not, Want Not A fungus that can convert waste paper into an antibacterial and super-absorbent material has been discovered by researchers at BorÃ¥s University College in Sweden.

Stimulating dyscalculia adds up

An international team of scientists have discovered that the brain’s right parietal lobe is responsible for the disorder, dyscalculia, a kind of numerical dyslexia. The discovery made by researchers at University College London, University of the Negev, Israel, Birkbeck Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, London, Maastricht University, Netherlands, and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Germany, could ultimately lead to new methods of diagnosis and management of the disorder through remedial teaching.

Dyscalculia is as common as dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with about one in twenty people affected. However, dyscalculia has been given little regard in the mainstream despite its potentially debilitating impact on quality of life. Roi Cohen Kadosh, of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience explains the implications of his study, which involved inducing dyscalculia: “This is the first causal demonstration that the parietal lobe is the key to understanding developmental dyscalculia,” he explains, “Most people process numbers very easily — almost automatically — but people with dyscalculia do not.” The team stimulated for a few milliseconds the right parietal lobes of volunteers carrying out an arithmetic test, using neuronavigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) . The stimulation essentially knocked out activity in that part of the brain and left the volunteers unable to react as quickly to the test.

“This provides strong evidence that dyscalculia is caused by malformations in the right parietal lobe and provides sold grounds for further study on the physical abnormalities present in dyscalculics’ brains,” adds Cohen Kadosh, “It’s an important step to the ultimate goal of early diagnosis through analysis of neural tissue, which in turn will lead to earlier treatments and more effective remedial teaching.”

The researchers will publish details of their findings in the April 17 issue of the journal Current Biology

Natural Choice

Taxol Structure Nature has provided the stock for pharmacy shelves for hundreds of years and is the ultimate medicinal chemist, according to research published in the March 23 issue of Journal of Natural Products.

David Newman and Gordon Craig of the National Cancer Institute demonstrated that less than a third of important “new chemical entities (NCEs)” found between 1981 and 2006 were entirely synthetic compounds as opposed to derivatives of naturally occurring molecules. The remaining 70% of the NCEs introduced during the last quarter century were natural products, obtained from sources such as plants and animals or designed to mimic natural product structures.

Natural products range from aspirin (originally obtained from the willow tree) to Taxol, the anticancer drug discovered in the Pacific yew tree. About half of all anti-cancer drugs introduced since the 1940s are either natural products or medicines derived directly from natural products, according to the researchers.

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Chemical pipe works

Chemical pipe works Mitch Garcia of UC Berkeley seems to be far more expert with the latest web 2.0 tool that lets you produce your own search algorithms than I, so I asked him to look into creating a Yahoo Pipe to allow anyone to search as many chemistry journals as possible that offer ASAP and in press papers online. And, much kudos to him, he has done just that. Here’s chemistry journals search pipe. He explains the process and the limitations in a little more detail on his own blog.

Give it a try and let us know what you think. What makes this tool totally tubular is that once you’ve run a search using a pipe, the results are their own RSS feed, which means you can subscribe to the results with your news reader (My Yahoo, Bloglines, Google Reader etc). Even more intriguing is the idea that you could presumably then use that feed as the basis for creating an even more sophisticated Pipe of your own.

For instance, this feed displays the results from Mitch’s Pipe searching all those chemistry journals for the word greenhouse. It’s quite unlikely that there will be any gardening papers in the ACS, RSC or Wiley chemistry journals, so you can be fairly sure that this feed will bring you the latest papers on greenhouse gases and their effects. Combine that with a feed for global warming, and one for climate change, and you should have the niche covered.

Orders of magnitude

Strangely, the phrase “orders of magnitude” featured in a visitor’s search efforts while browsing the sciencebase site. Unfortunately, other than using the phrase myself in the context of, for instance: “the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities is several orders of magnitude smaller than those emitted by natural processes”. I did not actually have a definition of orders of magnitude on the site. Until now. So here goes:

The order of magnitude is the scale of any given amount where each class contains values of a fixed ratio to the class preceding it. The ratio most commonly used is 10. For example, a kilogram is three orders of magnitude bigger than a gram.

In the greenhouse gas instance cited above, the phrase “orders of magnitude” is simply being used colloquially and can apply in many situations, such as the volume of water in the Pacific Ocean is many orders of magnitude greater than that contained in Lake Michigan. To give a more solid example, one might say “An order of magnitude difference between two values is a factor of 10. For example, the mass of the planet Saturn is almost 100 times that of Earth, so Saturn is two orders of magnitude more massive than Earth.

Orders of magnitude are not always on the decimal scale. For instance, the difference in size between a megabyte and a gigabyte is three orders of magnitude, but the multiplier is 1024 rather than 1000. Please correct me if I’m wrong on that, I guess you could define a single order of magnitude her as being based on 1024 rather than “10”.

Intelligent materials protect sports lovers

An intelligent plastic that is so flexible when left to its own devices while flow like a very slow moving liquid, but hit it with a hammer and the intelligent molecules form which it is made stiffen up instantaneously and absorb the energy of the blow. Such a polymer has been incorporated into textiles and clothing to create lightweight and flexible body armour for high-impact sports and other activities to save users from serious impact injuries. The polymer and textile-embedded material was the brainchild of UK company d3o, which has recently worked with a sports clothing manufacturer to develop a range of protective gear.

There was a video that demonstrated how to protect a falling egg using this material. This would make an excellent science fair project: compare different packaging materials for protecting eggs – cardboard, polycarbonate, d30 intelligent material. Unfortunately, the vid is no longer available.

The smart material is made up of a matrix of polymers with tiny pockets filled with a fluid. In normal wear, the material moves freely with your body movements but if you take a dive, the intelligent molecules in the fluid stiffen in less than a thousandth of a second, which makes them absorb the energy of the impact It works because under normal conditions, the polymer molecules move and slide across each other, but when they are put under rapid shear stress in an impact, for instance, the polymer molecules immediately form cross-links with one another and the material stiffens to take the brunt of the impact. Once the force is removed, the polymer cross-links are disengaged by further low force movements and the material reverts to its flexible state.

Power up your genome with chemistry

Post-genomic science Researchers have developed several tools to help them exploit the underlying chemistry of genomics, while novel chemistry has enabled faster, parallel sequencing methods that not only accelerate genomic research but also cut costs. The very same techniques allow sex chromosomes and complete genomes to be decoded faster and more cheaply than ever before.

Concomitantly, microfluidics technology is improving the way conventional fluorescence chemistry can be exploited in sequencing. Improved understanding of nanoscale channels – both synthetic and protein channels offers the possibility of studying individual biological macromolecules and microfabricated microarrays are opening up massively parallel opportunities. Novel chemical technologies are also opening up locked nucleic acids as well as non-DNA molecules such as microRNAs.

The so-called post-genomic era put the molecular smack in the middle of the biological quarter. Now, as cross-disciplinary communication matures, research at the intersection of chemistry and biology is working harder than ever to solve fundamental questions in science and medicine.

You can read the complete feature on the subject of chemistry in the post-genomic era from David Bradley in Science magazine today. It is the lead article on the Science Products page.

Anorexia and Kidney Disease

Anorexia nervosa is a serious and potentially fatal eating disorder usually characterized by a severely reduced appetite and often a total aversion to food. In the mainstream media, it is most commonly associated with teenage girls and the celebrity quest for a “size zero” figure. However, it is a serious and life-threatening disorder that goes far beyond the realm of body image and extreme dieting. Important clues as to the underlying causes of this disorder may be found in its association with chronic kidney disease.

According to Peter Stenvinkel of the Division of Renal Medicine, Karolinska University Hospital at Huddinge, Sweden, anorexia is observed frequently in kidney dialysis patients. The condition worsens as kidney disease progresses leading to severe muscle wasting and malnutrition, with all its associated health problems. Scientists had suggested a link to defective central nervous system control of appetite, so Stenvinkel and his colleagues have done an analysis of various biomolecules, including natural inflammatory compounds and sex hormones. Their results suggest that inflammation is closely linked to the development of anorexia in kidney patients and is more common in men than women.

Read the full story in today’s SpectroscopyNOW.

Frogs legs and AMPs

Solid state NMR is unlocking the secrets of compounds found in natural membranes from frogs’ legs to human lungs that could lead to an entirely new class of antibiotic drugs. The compounds in question are antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and they have been detected in every living creature studied so far. AMPs act as a first line chemical defence system in a huge range of organisms and could provide a novel approach to defeating drugs resistance in bacteria.

“Our overall mission is to use the kind of basic physical data we obtain from NMR to help interpret biological functions,” team leader Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy of the University of Michigan explains. As with most discoveries of this nature, it will be several years before any clinical trials for specific health problems or diseases are complete. “How it works against viruses are under investigation in other labs,” Ramamoorthy told me.

You can find out more about AMPs as the front line defenders in the latest issue of SpectroscopyNOW.