Spinneret - Weaving the chemical web one molecule at a time...

When nicotine binds to a neuron, how does the cell know to send the signal that announces a smoker’s high? A recently determined crystal structure of a key player in the process suggests that a sugar molecule has a simple mechanical role acting as a hinge to open a gate in the cell membrane. The research might one day lead to new treatments for substance addiction, depression, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and other disorders.

I discussed the issue with Lin Chen of the University of Southern California and you can read the full story in the X-ray crystallography channel on SpectroscopyNOW.com

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You may have seen the recent media buzz around MIT’s WiTricity - wireless transmission of electrical power using resonant magnetic induction. When Dimitris Sakellariou sent me his paper on wireless NMR and announced that “We are transferring wirelessly radio-frequency energy and nuclear spin response from a commercial NMR probe to the detector which is embedded inside the sample holder and spins together with it at thousands of turns per second at the magic angle.” I suspected a little bit of bandwagon jumping, but that is not the case. Sakellariou and his colleagues have been working in the field (pardon the pun) of NMR and the related magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for years, and achieved wireless NMR of solid state samples based on a setup that includes not only a magic angle spin of the sample but of the coil itself.

“Our findings just got published in Nature (vol. 447, p.694, 2007),” Sakellariou told me, “and they are very promising for the study of very small samples under high-resolution conditions.” He confesses that they announced their initial results at the EUROMAR 2005 conference, but many Spinneret readers will be all too aware of how long it can take from initial write-up of a paper until it appears in one’s chosen journal. Getting into the prestigious general science journal Nature also comes with numerous additional obstacles compared with a specialist outlet.

You can read my full write-up on Sakellariou’s work over on SpectroscopyNOW.com

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A single drop of blood absorbed on to a filter paper is all that is needed for a new test for lead, based on solid sampling-graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometry (SS-GFAAS). The minimally-invasive method would allow many more people, and children in particular, to be tested quickly and safely for exposure to lead and to facilitate follow-up industrial safety incidents involving the neurotoxic metal.

I wrote about this research over on the SpectroscopyNOW.com site, and asked team leader Martin Resano about the applications of his test in epidemiological studies. Apparently, there is already a well established approach to testing new-borns based on a filter paper test. However, he told me that the situation is very different, there is some reluctance in the clinic to adopt filter paper tests.

“Many people in the clinical community are against the filter paper test for Pb,” Resano told me, “Precisely, the goal of our work is to show that, if a suitable direct solid sampling technique such as SS-GFAAS is used (thus avoiding the tedious and contamination-prone step of digestion of the papers), it is feasible to achieve satisfactory results for Pb blood using the filter paper test.”

InChI=1/Pb/q+2

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