Believe Everything You Read on the Internet

Sometimes, rumors pop up on the internet. You should always believe them. Seriously. Nobody on the internet lies. Just the other day, I read that Phil Baran is not actually from New Jersey, but he is in fact part of an advanced alien invasion from Mars. Seriously. I read it on the internet. It must be true.

Structural Reassignment by Cool Science

Today, Vinogradova, Muller, and Buchwald have an excellent piece of investigative science in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. that I think is great, just great. And honestly, I'm a bit jaded and easily unimpressed (especially when the work isn't directly applicable to me finishing my Ph.D.). In fact, I liked this paper enough to write about it, and not just tweet it on the sidebar <---over there.

Lets start with a summary of why I think its great.

1. They decided to take a closer look at a "known" system - and they learned something new.

2. They crystallized a liquid using the work by Fujita et al.

...And onward with a more in depth look...

Experiments with Googling

[Disclaimer - I couldn't think of any good images for this blog post, so to liven it up a bit here are a few things you can use: 1) An ASCII game you can play in your browser that is quite fun - pro tip - let it run in the background while you're at work, 2) The even better sequel, 3) A link to this post with Nyan Cat on top. And now on with the science.]

Searching the chemical literature is part of the process of doing bench chemistry, or even thinking about doing bench chemistry. I can't even fathom how much slower my days would be if I needed to go to the library to find a reaction instead of turning to "The Googlefox." These days, we've got all  kinds of methods for scouring the chemical literature, Scifinder and Reaxys being two of the best. Of course, there are other useful databases: the ACS has a search feature , SDBS is super useful, and you can even get a good deal of information from Sigma-Aldrich. I'm certain there are plenty more.

And yet... I turn to Google.

The Not-So-Simple Development of a Litmus Test for Aldehyde Oxidase Metabolism of Heteroarenes

Some of you may have noticed our latest publication that’s just out in the "just accepted" section of J. Med. Chem. which describes the use of our difluoromethylation reagent, DFMS, as a predictor of whether an azaheteroaromatic fragment will be susceptible to metabolism by aldehyde oxidase (AO). The actual chemistry is covered in depth in the paper, so I thought I’d write about some of the challenges and doubts we faced in developing the project from the initial concept to the finished paper.