Magnolia Gum, Organic Uranium, Biotech Sweetener

Magnolia flower

I’ve got a weird and wonderful mix of chemistry news again on the Reactive Reports site and my Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com

Barking Up the Right Tree for Fresh Breath – A traditional Chinese extract from the bark of the magnolia tree could give you fresh breath and kill off the oral microbes that cause halitosis.

Cats Don’t Work Like That – The three-way catalytic converter in your car does not, it turns out, work the way chemists thought it did. One of the key functions of a “cat” is to convert toxic carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide.

Double Vision With Coordination Polymers – Calcite crystals can make you see double. You don’t ingest them to achieve some kind of mind warp effect; they are simply birefringent, having essentially two focal points.

Organic Uranium – The first ever uranium methylidyne molecule has been synthesized by US chemists despite the reactivity of the heavy, heavy metal.

And, in The Alchemist this week, we hear of an award to an entire nation for its efforts in energy research and development. In research news we hear of a record-breakingly short metal-metal bond that beats the textbook great, counterintuitive results of electron pairing comes to light in bismuth, and how to extract the organic impurities from water with an old filter for a fresher taste. Also in this week’s issue, a biotech solution to sweetness and a heads up for a Mickey Mouse protein involved in channeling potassium ions. The Alchemist Newsletter is available via ChemWeb.com, online since 1997.

Find Antioxidants Online

A new database of antioxidant values for a wide range of foods is now online. The main application will be in ongoing research on the purported health benefits of antioxidants. For example, many fruits and vegetables are known to be good sources of antioxidant vitamins, such as vitamin E, C, and beta-carotene, but these natural foods also contain other compounds, collectively known as phytonutrients, that may contribute to health effects. You can find the ORAC database here.

Sweet Proteins, Crystallised Proteins

Brazzein sweet protein

A new naturally derived artificial sweetener could soon hit the market, thanks to the development of a mass production technique devised by University of Wisconsin-Madison research Fariba Assadi-Porter. The sweetener, known as brazzein, is a 54 amino acid protein derived from an extract of the fruit of the tropical plant Pentadiplandra brazzeana Baillon. It has been eaten in West Africa across the millennia, but only recently caught the attention of the West because of its incredible sweetness. The protein extract tastes sweet only to humans and old-world monkeys and is is 2000 times sweeter than sucrose when compared to a 2% solution of sugar.

Assadi-Porter and her colleagues are using spectroscopy to help them understand the relationship between the structure of this protein and its sweetness. They have recently devised a new approach to fermenting it on a large scale and startup company Natur Research is now seeking FDA approval to commercialise the protein as a food stuff for the low-calorie drinks and food industries. A paper detailing the production process has now been accepted by Protein Expression and Purification Journal, and you can read more about the story in the NMR channel on SpectroscopyNOW.

More on proteins in this week’s issue: Roderick MacKinnon and his colleagues at Rockerfeller U have come up with a novel technique, lipid-detergent-mediated crystallization, that allows them to crystallise membrane proteins, such as the voltage-dependent potassium ion channel, in as near as natural state as possible. The approach could open the door to countless studies of membrane proteins using crystallography that have not previously been possible. More on that in the SpectroscopyNOW X-ray ezine, here

Also in this week’s round up, news not related directly to proteins and molecular biology. Researchers in Canada and the US have used MRI to demonstrate that there is something like a three-year delay in the development of certain regions of the brain in children with ADHD. The most obvious delay is seen in the front cortex, a region important in thinking, concentration, and planning. Rather than worrying parents, the discovery should be reassuring to parents and sufferers, says Philip Shaw of the NIMH Child Psychiatry Branch who led the research because although there is a delay, brain development is otherwise normal. “Finding a normal pattern of cortex maturation, albeit delayed, in children with ADHD should be reassuring to families and could help to explain why many youth eventually seem to grow out of the disorder,” he says.

The research also revealed that the regions affected by the developmental delay are coincident with the regions that develop precociously in children with autism. More on the scan results, again in SpectroscopyNOW.

Open Access Scientific Publishing

Imperial College’s Bob MacCallum runs an interesting site called Compare Stuff, which I’ve reviewed on various occasions elsewhere. Recently, he started blogging about some of the interesting results that emerge when you compare search engine hit rates for different terms against each other. One of the most interesting comparisons was run using the terms “open access” versus “journal”.

The results produce an intriguing chart in which there appear to be far more mentions of bioinformatics in the context of the term journal and open access compared with, say, maths, astronomy, or psychology. As MacCallum is bioinformaticist he says that this makes sense as many of the leading figures in the open access movement come from this field. However, physicists and computer scientists have been enormously active, if less vocal, about OA, so it is odd that those two fields do not show up quite so sharpy. What about open access chemistry, you say? Hmmmm.

Give MacCallum’s Compare Stuff site a try, it’s quite amazing what charts you can make. I just tried Organic versus Inorganic in the context of “emotions”. It looks like organic and inorganic are equally stressful but leave few people anxious, scared, lonely, happy, jealous, angry or sad.

Scientific Job Surfing

Science Job Surfing

‘Be as creative, obscure and tangential as possible,’ is Allan Jordan’s advice to anyone surfing the net for a new job. He tried every site available until he got his present position at Cambridge-based Ribotargets a small pharmaceutical research outfit, having worked on novel pro-drug approaches to the treatment of malignant melanoma (MDEPT) and other anticancer agents at Reading University in England.

Jordan’s method worked well. ‘I searched every job site for any vacancies not just in medicinal chemistry, but in assay development, molecular biology, biochemistry, and pharmacokinetics,’ he says and this eventually got him a job.

When you are looking for that perfect position, a spot of surfing could certainly speed things up. Some approaches might work better than others and in the end it all boils down to what you have to offer and what you are looking for.

A general jobs site such as New Scientist Jobs or ScienceCareers is probably as good a place to start as any. ‘The best use I’ve found of the net is the on-line newspapers, The Guardian, The Telegraph, New Scientist…’ says Bob Noble, virtual reality researcher at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. Nature, New Scientist and Science took the brunt of Jordan’s searching too, but there’s lots of competition from other applicants from the print editions, which is where a more focused site like ScienceCareers or ScienceJobs can help.

ScienceCareers provides more than just jobs listings adding advice, employer profiles, careers fair information and features on job-market issues. ‘Such sites also helps you prepare for an interview,’ says biology post-doc Sarah Milburn.

If your ambitions are more focused, then a specialist site might be the next place to visit. ‘If you go to the more generalized sites,’ Paul Guinnessy, Webmaster at PhysicsWeb explains, ‘you get swamped by adverts, with a specialist site you can drill down to specific subject areas.’

In contrast, Noble found the experience of net job searching disheartening, ‘Basically, my difficulty is matching what I have to what is there. Years of research and development experience, a PhD in computer graphics, a maths degree, experience with robots and the nuclear industry. I’m a researcher more than a programmer, I like graphics but I don’t write games. How do you tell that to a search engine?’

There are more useful approaches for specialist job seekers, however. ‘The general rule,’ says Darien Pugh who headed up ChemWeb’s Job Exchange [no longer available], ‘is the more specific a site, the more likely you are to look at it and the more likely you are to come across the information you need.’ Paul Heelis of Chemjobs.net emphasizes the point, try searching for a chemistry job at a general site, he suggests: ‘You will be lucky to get more than three,’ he says.

Stephanie van Willigenburg highlights the international benefits of job seeking on the net if you’re working abroad. ‘I’m doing a post-doc at York U in Toronto, and certainly all the jobs I’ve applied for this year have been from internet lists or the Web,’ she says, ‘the web has been invaluable for reading ads in the UK’s Times Higher Education Supplement and useful for checking out people’s research interests so you can tailor your application to a particular department.’

According to Phil Mackie who did endless surfing till he got his current post-doc position at Trinity College Dublin, ‘The web sites of the learned societies and the science journals are the best place to start because the other sites don’t focus on the scientific sub-divisions.’ As far as uploading a resume though, he says, ‘Sometimes you need to ‘fine tune’ a resume to match the job you are going for – but if you’re posting your resume it has to be general.’

Chris Rayner a researcher working on nucleic acids and biotransformations at Leeds University has successfully placed ads for post-docs on the academic site www.jobs.ac.uk. But, while that has been a successful approach for finding candidates, he reveals that his own students are more likely to get a job through careers fairs than by other means, though.

Some web sites allow you to post a resume into a repository of putative interviewees. What approach might you use to boost the chances of your resume being picked from the potentially hundreds if not thousands of others out there? ‘It is crucial to put in all the important information,’ says Pugh, ‘and the kinds of ‘keywords’ you would normally include in a paper resume, such as “teamworker”, “management experience” etc.’

So, your resume is in good shape, is there anything else to watch out for in using the internet as a career stepping stone? First, you should avoid being caught by your employer’s site-tracking software by doing your searching from home – some employers are taking an increasingly hard line on Internet ‘abuse’. But, even if you do all your surfing from home that won’t hide your resume once it is posted so your employer could readily discover you are looking for a new job. ‘Candidates, can specify the companies they don’t want to be shown to at ChemJobs.net’, says Heelis, which offers some protection to the rightly paranoid. Pugh, is also now considering anonymous resume posting for those who want it, although he points out that it is difficult to hide itchy feet in the workplace!

Guinnessy does not recognize this as a problem, in physics at least, and probably the academic world in general. ‘I think most employers are too busy to go surfing around the jobs-wanted pages of various sites and the risk is limited, especially considering most scientists are on short-term contracts anyway!’

This feature article originally appeared in my Adapt or Die column on HMSBeagle although many of the ideas discussed are as valid today as they ever were. However, some of the people interviewed are not necessarily in the same jobs now as they were at the time of writing. Please let me know in the comments if you have any updates I should publish.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

AAAS Science Careers

New Scientist Jobs

Institute of Physics Job Site

Science Jobs

Chemistry Jobs

If you have any jobs sites you’d like me to add to the list, please leave a comment and a link

This Little Epo Goes to Market

Epothilone B Ixempra

One of the very first articles I wrote for Elemental Discoveries (Issue 3 in March 1997, it was) was on the subject of a novel class of anticancer compound that had been isolated from soil bacteria. The article (archived now on Sciencebase) discussed the discovery of a total synthesis for the archetypal epothilone. Well, more than a decade since, and two decades after their initial discovery, the epothilones are about to enter the pharmaceutical market under the Bristol-Myers Squibb marque.

The epothilones that Gerhard Höfle and Hans Reichenbach discovered in myxobacteria block the somatic cell components known as microtubules, inhibiting cell division causing tumors to shrink or even disappear.

Bristol-Myers Squibb acquired the license for epothilone B for clinical testing. As of this month, US oncologists can prescribe epo B, under the tradename Ixempra, for metastatic breast cancer. European approval is anticipated for 2008.

InChIKEY: QXRSDHAAWVKZLJ-PVYNADRNBK

Is Your Trailing Spouse a Significant Other?

Dual career couples in science

Today’s blog post is a little bit of a cheat, it’s a re-run of a feature I wrote for HMSBeagle the now defunct life sciences webzine for its Adapt or Die column to which I contributed on a monthly basis for a couple of years. However, the content and sentiment (if not necessarily the cited relationships) may well be as valid today as they were when I originally wrote the piece. I’d value your opinions on the article and whether or not things have changed in recent years for dual-career couples in science. Is your spouse an SO or an iSO?

Ever since Madame Curie said, Oui!’ and probably well before, there have been dual-career couples in science. Today, finding a satisfying and well-paid job is difficult at the best of times, but what happens when there are two of you? Job-hunting takes on an extra dimension when both partners are looking for that rare position. Often they are forced to live apart or maintain two residences sometimes having to fly between ports to see each other, and then only when either one is not on conference. Getting tenured positions for two at the same institution or even the same city can be almost impossible.

In many cases, it seems, the so-called ‘trailing spouse’ – a rather dubious phrase – gets to take on an administrative, part-time or basically lesser role while their partner scrambles up the academic ladder. It cannot be easy for someone to watch as the academic career of their partner soars as they garner publication, gather promotions, and gain peer respect, while they idle along with little prospect of catching up.

There are many permutations – couples may both be in the same scientific field or not. They may be at a similar stage in their respective careers or not. And, they may or may not have children. Questions constantly arise from these permutations such as how do both partners attend the conference in their joint field when childcare is not available. The problems can be immense when one partner heads for a center of excellence while a more ‘junior’ spouse stands little chance of tenure there. Chemical engineer Diane Rossiter, for instance, is in a dual-career couple but has decided due to pressures of work and family commitments to take a career break now her husband is moving jobs in academia. She would have been condemned to commuting some 2.5 hours each day otherwise in order to maintain her position as a lecturer at Loughborough University.

There are of course, many successful dual-career couples: University of Washington zoologists James Truman and Lynn Riddiford, Oxford neuroscientist Susan Greenfield and Oxford chemist-author Peter Atkins, bird researchers Kenneth and Mary Able at New York State University. Molecular biologists Seth Schor and Ana Schor at Scotland’s Dundee University. Geneticist Ruth Shaw and statistician Frank Shaw at Minnesota University. Crystallographer Judith Howard, the first female full professor of chemistry in England and her consultant physician husband David. The list goes on…

But, institutions that ignore the two-body problem can lose their primary candidate when satisfactory employment for the spouse fails to arise. Even when a candidate accepts a job, they might soon leave if better prospects come to light elsewhere for their spouse. Traditionally, according to Laurie McNeil of North Carolina University and Marc Sher of the College of William and Mary in a report on the plight of two-body physicists, the male partner has taken the lead and the female followed behind. But, for younger couples and for partnerships where there is not much of an academic disparity between them, this is not such an easy choice to make. Indeed, the issue is even more complicated for same sex couples.

McNeil and Sher point out that, at least as far as physics is concerned, there are very few institutions that face up to the problems facing dual career couples. The establishment of formal programs to assist a spouse have been slow to gain prevalence, although some establishments have had policies in place since the 1970s. Institutions can so easily cite anti-nepotism law so they can shrug off responsibility for a new employee’s partner. Departmental culture too can be very resistant to accommodating dual career-couples. Colleagues may not only perceive nepotism, but also see personal problems impinging on their laboratory time and ultimately having a disruptive influence on the department. Indeed, problems can go deeper as one academic in a UK university found to her cost when her husband got a lower-ranked job at her institution and could not cope with having his wife as his ‘line manager’. The couple ended up in the divorce courts.

Rhonda Malone first came across the problems facing dual-career couples some five years ago. She took on a new job at the University of Maryland with the aim of establishing the Dual Career Program there. She points out that helping new recruits avoid being distracted by personal matters and giving them a positive vibe about the university are the prime movers. ‘The purpose of the program is both to facilitate recruitment and to aid in getting new faculty off to a good start,’ she says. Such programs also help “formalize” an institution’s response to assistance, such as offering new recruits useful information like the job listings and contacts at local institutions, research centers, and other major employers.

UMD’s scheme is particularly successful because there are so many opportunities for biomedical researchers in the area. There are several other institutions, federal government facilities, many companies, hospitals and other research centers. On two occasions, Malone told me, spouses have obtained tenure-track positions at UMD, for instance. For the first, Malone helped the male partner, find an interesting and relevant job initially, then the department hired him the next year. ‘Our program is broadly for significant others, I’ve worked with spouses, partners, and fiance(e)s.

‘While our program doesn’t guarantee a job at the university or elsewhere for the unemployed spouse,’ adds Nancy Crist of Ohio University, it is designed to serve as a job-hunting resource.’ She adds that Ohio has a Dual Career Fund available to help fund university positions for spouses of current and prospective employees. Indeed, there are some imaginative financial arrangements possible at various institutions. Splitting a salary is sometimes possible irrespective of the types of position involved as long as they are roughly equivalent. But, a job share can only work well if the partners are at the same academic level. As a formal solution it can have problems, such as how to deal with promotion, cover disciplinary issues, and approach financial aspects such as benefits, raises, insurance and pensions. There are also issues such as what happens if one retires? If one partner dies? Or, if a couple split? The big advantage of a job share is the potential for freeing up time for other pursuits. Even then, couples might find their total working hours far exceeding 100% without additional recompense.

Despite the best efforts of those running such programs, there are several other negatives, such as the reluctance of academic departments approached to make special dispensations even for the short term. It must be in an employer’s best interests to help both partners. Couples where both partners are in satisfying job positions are more likely to stick around and be academically productive.

The Graduate College Scholars Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was initiated in 1984. According to Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Janet Glaser, problems facing dual-career couples in what is a much smaller than average community can be a particularly severe problem. Indeed, there is only one institution of higher education – the University – so there are few options, especially if both individuals are in the same field. Despite that, Glaser says that the UIUC scholars program has provided a successful transition to placement of spouses in faculty employment or in academic professional or administrative positions, especially in social sciences and humanities.

Computer professional Letty Foulkes who is spending a year in the US while her husband is on sabbatical at Cornell says, ‘Dual-career couples still face problems.’ Her husband is a reader in Physics and she adds that if they wanted to move he would have to find a job first because his is the more specialized field. She does concede that although she could be considered a ‘trailing spouse’, she feels employable and could find a challenging and interesting job in her field. Nancy Cox, a geneticist at Chicago University, believes part of the problem is simply male dominance in science and academia. ‘In many disciplines, the most successful practitioners were successful in part because they had a joint effort,’ she says, ‘There were/are plenty of labs in which a spouse (usually the wife) is responsible for running a big lab. When women go into the workforce, they almost never have that kind of support – their husbands have lives and careers.’

Indeed, the problem of having a tenured spouse can lead to long-term disaffection by academia. Elizabeth Griffin, an astrophysicist has spent her career in Oxbridge on a long succession of short-term grants. She attributes this state of affairs largely on the attitude of universities to her then being married to a tenured staff member. She was told, when attempting to enter faculty, that she “didn’t need a job”, she “had a husband and he had a job” and she “wasn’t starving”.

David Jefferies, a senior lecturer at Surrey University is married to Christina a professor of Social Gerontology at the University of London and they have been a dual career couple since she got her PhD in 1978. ‘It has posed constraints,’ he says, many for her, fewer for me although she is better adapted to the routine work requirements of modern academia and, he adds, ‘she has taken over the lead, if such there is, in terms of status and income.’

Geographer Megan Blake of Sheffield University in England has studied the issue of dual-career couples. She herself left New England-New Hampshire where her husband was working at Dartmouth College. In her words, she ‘trailed’ her husband to Leeds and secured a job at nearby Sheffield. Blake works with husband Adrian Bailey (Leeds University) and Thomas Cooke (Connecticut University) on career trajectories for married couples. ‘Many US universities will consider offering a second post to a trailing spouse,’ she says, ‘but, historically this second post was for the female partner and often involved some type of administrative or temporary job rather than a job with a reasonable career ladder.’

The whole issue of dual-career couples can affect almost anyone in a partnership. There are countless permutations and this article did not even begin to address the added dimension of same-sex relationships. The problems have been around for a long time, ranging from a commutable home to dealing with divorce when a couple undertake a job share. There are some initiatives and for some couples the situation has improved, but, says Blake, ‘The point needs to be made over and over that the issue of dual career couples needs to be addressed.’

RESOURCES

Dual couples resources web site – no longer online, but found in archive.org

Problems facing physicists – McNeil and Sher’s report and dual career couples and links to spousal hiring programs.

BOX

FACT 43% of married female physicists are married to other physicists, whereas only 6% of married male physicists have a physicist spouse

FACT Some 38% of female chemists are married to other scientists, while just 21% of male chemists are married to a scientist, according to statistics reported by the American Chemical Society.

Holiday Reading for Scientists

Donald Prothero - Evolution

I’ve allowed a stack of books to accumulate on my desk over the last few weeks, some of them I’ve glanced through, others I’ve devoured over the course of a few days in snatched moments between writing, researching, blogging, and fixing web site servers. Some of them are inflammatory others are a bit of a damp squib, nevertheless ahead of the US holiday, Black Friday, and looking forward to Christmas (other winter solstice festivals are available), I thought I’d cite a few of them on Sciencebase to give you some holiday reading ideas.

First up is Don Prothero’s “Evolution – What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters”. In this book Prothero, a specialist in ancient North American rhinos tears into the evolution deniers with great vigour. He sets up his position from the start, pointing out that theory is not a derogatory word in science. He emphasises that scientists do not deal in facts as the lay person would understand them. Instead, scientists work with observations (evidence) and hypotheses (explanations). This does not, of course, imply that scientists have any doubts about certain facts. Apples will fall towards earth when detached from their tree. An almost spherical earth orbits around the sun. The fossilised remains of animals long extinct reveals that evolution takes place.

Next up is my former colleague at New Scientist Gabrielle Walker with An Ocean of Air, a natural history history of the atmosphere. Air is not only about breathing. At ground level air is converted directly into solid food and without it every living thing on earth would starve. Its outer reaches, despite the occasional hole, soak up cosmic rays that would otherwise fry us all. And, yet it is a fragile and complex system, we would do well to understand better.

Elias J Corey is the granddaddy of organic synthesis, in Molecules and Medicine, he and co-authors Barbara Czakó, and László Kürti take us on a whirwind tour of drug discovery and the search for medicinal molecules. One hundred of the most significant molecules currently in use are discussed, the discovery, application, and mode of action revealed. Structures for all the molecules described are given as well as pertinent crystallographic results, it would have been nice, but added to the price to have included a disk with the mol and cif files for use by educators and others.

Other books on my desk that deserve another mention include Toby Freedman’s Career Opportunities in Biotechnology & Drug Development, which does what it says on the tin and, Steven Pinker’s fascinating The Stuff of Thought

A late arrival for this list is The Best of Technology Writing 2007 edited by Newsweek technology columnist Steven Levy. I remember reading the last volume of this series on a plane headed for a vacation in Italy, it was an excellent holiday book, from a quick glance at the contributor list, this latest edition looks like it could be the same.

Revealing Invisible Science

Revealing the Invisible Web with CCReSD

The notion of the Invisible Web created quite a buzz, long before Google even had just one “oo” let alone half a dozen. The phrase alluded to the putatively millions of additional web pages, essentially hidden from view behind database scripts – fascinating product catalogues, riveting company backend data, and, scientific databases.

Scientific databases, you say, invisible?

Of course! You probably think of the databases with which you are personally familiar as being directly accessible and that there is nothing hidden about their contents at all. Much of the search functionality of countless scientific databases will work perfectly well regardless of your IP address, irrespective of whether you have logged in, and from almost anywhere in the world. Some are closed off to non-subscribers or those outside a particular campus or organisation, of course, but many are not. So, by what stretch of the imagination might they be described as hidden, or worse, invisible?

Well, do you know precisely what is contained in the close to 1000 terabytes of information in the National Climatic Data Centre? What about your favourite literature database? What about PubMed or ChemSpider? Or, any of dozens and dozens of other databases hidden by virtue of their very nature from conventional search engines. Obviously, specific users will have a relatively detailed perspective of the contents of a particular database, but what about cross-disciplines or, perish the thought, lay outsiders who may need to access information quickly without spending hours, days, weeks, attempting to find the right database and then attempting to figure out what is in it?

Yih-Ling Hedley and Anne James of the Faculty of Engineering and Computing at Coventry University, and Muhammad Younas of the Department of Computing at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, England, point out that invisible web databases dynamically generate results in response to users’ queries. And, therein lies the rub. Search engines, which traditionally crawl, spider and index, the web, see only the front-end search page when they visit a site acting as a user interface for a database, in general. This means that the actual keywords associated with the data within those databases is not accessed, because it is dynamically generated by real users, and is not rendered by the search engine robots

Nevertheless, Hedley and colleagues say, “The categorisation of such databases into a category scheme has been widely employed in information searches,” but with only limited success. Now, the team has developed and tested a Concept-based Categorisation over Refined Sampled Documents (CCReSD) approach that effectively handles information extraction, summarisation and categorisation of such databases. Unlike a conventional search engine, CCReSD behaves in some ways like a real live user and detects and extracts query-related information from sampled documents of databases.

The result is that the system can generate a table of keyword terms and their frequencies to summarise database contents. The team explains that their system also generates descriptions of concepts from their coverage and specificity given in a category scheme.

Okay, sounds useful, CCReSD is basically a database savvy search engine spider that can create an index from otherwise hidden web resources by spoofing the behaviour of a genuine human user of that database. Aside from the potential breaching of database terms & conditions that forbid automated accesses, this could be a potentially very useful tool for technical subjects that have many, many hidden databases.

The team tested their system on the Help Site database (computer manuals on a system with multiple templates), CHID (a healthcare database with a single template) and the general database-driven site Wired News (single template). They found that it could extract relevant information from sampled documents and generate terms and frequencies with improved accuracy on previous approaches.

The team discusses CCReSD in detail in the Int J High Performance Computing Networking, 2007, 5, 24-33

Taking the P out of Urine Testing

Blood pressure hormone

A new approach to testing urine samples without having to purify them first has led to the discovery of a new hormone that controls sodium excretion and so could be involved in controlling high blood pressure. Too much sodium equates to raised bp. The discovery solves a riddle that confronted medical scientists for more than four decades and could lead to new approaches to treating high blood pressure.

I asked team leader Frank Schroeder about the work and discuss it in detail in this week’s SpectroscopyNOW. One issue that must be addressed before such a discovery can be applied realistically to the develop of new therapies for high blood pressure, or even low blood pressure, is to find out whether the hormone is involved in other control systems in the body. This is somewhat likely given that most other known hormones multitask. I asked Schroeder about this aspect of the research:

“At this point, it is difficult to speculate about what other biological processes might be influenced by the newly identified compounds, and the next step will be to find the receptor(s) that the [hormonal] xanthurenic acid derivatives bind to,” he told me. “From our analyses, it appears that the two xanthurenic acid derivatives represent the actual signalling molecules – the activity is very well-defined and the compounds are of high specific potency. Furthermore, a closely related metabolite, xanthurenic acid itself, is not active.”

Also, in this week’s issue, in the field of atomic spectroscopy, Jordanian scientists have found that garlic extract can reduce the levels of the toxic heavy metals, cadmium and lead, in vital organs, such as the liver, heart, and kidneys. You can read more about that here.

In pure chemistry, it has been a record-breaking year for coordination chemists Klaus Theopold and Kevin Kreisel of the University of Delaware and their colleagues who have synthesised an organometallic chromium compound with the shortest Cr-Cr bond ever. Not since the 1978 work of F. Albert Cotton and his team at Texas A&M University has such a short one been seen. Theopold told me that he does not think it will be too long before this new record is broken. “I don’t think it will be another 30 years, although I’d like to hold on to the record for a while,” he said, “As to who, there are three possibilities: somebody who is not trying for it, and discovers it accidentally (like us), Phil Power, or myself, because I am now interested and have some ideas.”

Finally, the rather delicate subject of turning raw sewage into compost for farms. Remy Albrecht of the Paul Cézanne University in Aix-Marseille and colleagues have developed an infra-red technique that could be used to monitor how well the composting process is going for biological wastes, such as sewage sludge. Obviously, compost quality for land application must be monitored and controlled closely, but there are so many benefits, such as quickly raising nutrient levels and improving soil quality that it is worth the effort. An analytical approach to near infrared reflectance spectroscopy can provide an inexpensive way to monitor the composting process, Albrecht told me.

“NIRS is a highly reproducible technique able to draw a precise chemical fingerprint of an organic material Moreover, NIRS is rapid and makes it possible to analyse a large number of samples in a practical and timely manner. Control of maturation can be easily simplified with good calibrations and a data bank in reference,” he said.

I do worry about the accumulation of heavy metals from such biological sources as with each iteration from crop/livestock, to dinner table, to sewage plant, back to farm, they could increase in concentration. There is also the issue of pathogens. I’d be interested to learn what safeguards are in place to prevent their circulation.