Two weeks ago the write up of a week-long scientific discussions around artificial intelligence for natural product drug discovery in Leiden at the Lorentz Center got published (doi:10.1038/s41573-023-00774-7, free PDF). Sadly, the meetings was still during the (partial) lockdown, and I think my contribution could have been more extensive.

“A cord of three strands is not easily broken.” —Ecclesiastes 4:12 Computational chemistry, like all attempts to simulate reality, is defined by tradeoffs. Reality is far too complex to simulate perfectly, and so scientists have developed a plethora of approximations, each of which reduces both the cost (i.e. time) and the accuracy of the simulation.

This paper got published in July already, but I had not had the time yet to blog about this exciting work by Irini Furxhi and Ammar Ammar: A data reusability assessment in the nanosafety domain based on the NSDRA framework followed by an exploratory quantitative structure activity relationships (QSAR) modeling targeting cellular viability (doi:10.1016/j.impact.2023.100475) The study has two sides to it: first, it looks into how far we

Some 13 years ago, I speculated about the longevity of the type of science communication then (and still now) represented by Blogs. I noted one new project called ArchivePress that was looking into providing solutions equivalent to what scientific journals have done for some 350 years of science communication. The link to ArchivePress no longer works, but details of the project can still be found here.

About four weeks ago the Fall 2023 American Chemical Society meeting (#ACSFall2023). I have attended a few ACS meetings in person and even organized a symposium at the 2010 ACS meeting in Boston. This time too, I did not participate in person, tho visiting San Francisco again would have been nice. I gave two presentations (slides doi:10.5281/zenodo.8255394), but have not uploaded my slides of the first presentation to Zenodo yet.

I just want to drop this here. There are various ways to make BridgeDb identifier mapping files.

ICYMI: Ari and I announced our new company, Rowan! We wrote an article about what we're hoping to build, which you can read here. Also, this blog is now listed on The Rogue Scholar, meaning that posts have DOIs and can be easily cited. Conventional quantum chemical computations operate on a collection of atoms and create a single wavefunction for the entire system, with an associated energy and possibly other properties.

The schematic representation of a chemical reaction mechanism is often drawn using a palette of arrows connecting or annotating the various molecular structures involved. These can be selected from a chemical arrows palette, taken for this purpose from the commonly used structure drawing program Chemdraw.

The Swern oxidation[cite]10.1016/0040-4020(78)80197-5[/cite] is a class of “activated” dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) reaction in which the active species is a chlorodimethylsulfonium chloride salt.

The Pauling model for enzymatic catalysis states that enzymes are “antibodies for the transition state”—in other words, they preferentially bind to the transition state of a given reaction, rather than the reactants or products. This binding interaction stabilizes the TS, thus lowering its energy and accelerating the reaction.