Like how artists uses paints, textures, and materials to create their artwork, nature “uses” molecules and their respective atoms to create the biological entities that we recognize around us. I’d like to begin a series of essays on the details of how the current understanding of chemistry relates to human emotion and psychology, and how […]
Category Archives: Biochemistry
In this post I’d like to discuss a natural product that is near and dear to my heart; the oil of the Copaiba genus of trees. The reason this natural product is special to me is because it’s mechanism of action was part of a side project I investigated as a graduate student. During that […]
One important class of proteins found in eukaryotic domain of biology is chaperonins. These proteins serve to assist the preparation of other proteins via assisted folding as well as other mechanisms. These types of proteins have emerged as potential targets for antifungal therapeutics since, without their function, many other essential cellular processes fail. A “new” […]
Today I will be discussing an interesting class of compounds referred to as racetams. Racetams are relatively simple molecules discovered over 60 years ago. Like many simple, aliphatic molecules with nitrogen incorporated, they have a distinct psychoactive effect. Looking at the physicochemical diversity among the five commercially available racetams I have studied, there is a […]
How a molecule interacts within a living organism is incredibly complicated. Even the simplest molecules can interact with over 25,000 protein products from genes (not including their splice variants) as well as a wide variety of lipids, sugars, nucleic acids, and their combinations distributed throughout the body. In a typical drug discovery effort, a narrow […]
Most molecules relevant to life have chirality, a feature which means there are multiple geometric arrangements of an otherwise atomically identical compound. This feature gives a certain geometric asymmetry to molecules which may superficially look the same. Somewhere in the crucible of life, this asymmetry became systematic. Deoxyribose, ribose, lipids, and proteins took on a […]
Two of the most important classes I took as a graduate student were CHE542, also known as chemical biology, and CHE 536, also known as molecular modelling of biological molecules. In both classes, we discussed many different aspects of biology. Both were in my second semester as a graduate student. The classes cemented my very […]
During my time as a Ph.D. candidate, I was tasked with creating a research proposal as part of my penultimate meeting with my doctoral committee. I was genuinely excited to take a step back from my day-to-day research and create a plan for a totally new project. Unfortunately, my advisor limited me to make proposals […]
In terms of drug design, there’s the important question of what biologically relevant molecule to target for therapeutic effects. In terms of leishmanial drug discovery, a very interesting new co-crystal structure was deposited in the protein data bank. The structure an allosteric inhibitor of Leishmania major co-crystallized with methionyl-tRNA synthetase. This interesting X-ray structure represents […]
A lot has been said about the residence time, or binding kinetics, of small molecules to their targets. Drug binding kinetics has gained increased attention in medicinal chemistry and pharmacology due to its potentially stronger correlation to in vivo efficacy of drugs relative to a drugs thermodynamic affinity for its target. Since this is a […]
- 1
- 2