it's that time of the year when everything is winding down and everyone recharges and reflects... oh no, wait, it's the box filled with ~1000 pages of reaction mechanisms of biomolecule conversions. I will be reflecting on those to have the grades ready on January 16th

Great to see this one out in final form! DNA nanocrane-based catalysts for region-specific protein modification - now published in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry pubs.rsc.org/en/content/art…

EFMC | ACSMEDI Medicinal Chemistry Frontiers, co-organised by the EFMC and ACS MEDI, will take place in Utrecht, NL on April 8-11, 2024. The programme will include 3 plenary lectures and 9 sessions on key topics in Med Chem. Please, check for information: medchemfrontiers.org

Fantastische actie. Haal wetenschap uit het lab en breng het in een voor iedereen toegankelijk jasje dicht bij de bezoekers! Ga dat zien mensen!

Very happy to share this result from a fresh collaboration with the lab of cees dekker. During our work on synthetic peptide phytohormones, we witnessed first-hand the difficulty of identifying sulfotyrosines (sTyr) PTMs on these peptides. (1/5) Wageningen U&R Organic Chemistry PhDs

Not only do they decompose easily in the mass spectrometer, the mass of this PTM can only be distinguished from phosphotyrosine (pTyr) using high-resolution MS, making proper identification very challenging. As such, sulfated peptide phytohormones often evade detection. (2/5)

Therefore, I asked Cees if nanopores could not detect sTyr but also to distinguish sTyr from pTyr using nanopore sequencing. Our PhD-student Jasper van de Sande synthesized a library of mutants of the prominent peptide hormone phytosulfokine (PSK), and Xiuqi Chen... (3/5)

...analyzed them using their nanopore setup. Although the traces looked a bit unusual, high consensus was reached and accurate discrimination of these two PTMs was obtained. In fact, the unusual appearance makes sense on a molecular level, and aids proper identification. (4/5)

The details are found in this preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…. They show that nanopore sequencing will be of great value for peptide phytohormone identification in the future, especially now that it has revealed its discriminatory power on these very similar PTMs! (5/5)

Major paper coming up! #alert Something with DNA and the first realization of a new type of bond in a man-made system. Biology implemented it to resist mechanical forces, now we can do the same. #staytuned #5days

Here it is, the first bond that strengthens under stress (Nature Chemistry). Excellent work by Martijn van Galen, Annemarie Bok and Taieesa Peshkovsky, in collaboration with Joris Sprakel green mechanobiology and Jasper van der Gucht! Wageningen U&R Physical Chemistry and Soft Matter - WUR ORC_WUR nature.com/articles/s4155…

If you don't have time to read the full paper yet, here's a nice little recap on this paper on the C2W website: sciencelink.net/nieuws/nieuwe-… Thanks Daniel for the very nice write-up!

8y in the making and out now. Very proud of this, in collaboration with Albada Lab, by fantastic phd student Martijn van Galen. We managed to engineer one of Nature’s most clever molecular mechanobiology tool from the bottom up: de novo-catch bonds…a 🧵 nature.com/articles/s4155…

Happy to share our new paper in Nature Chemical Biology! Photoproximity labeling of endogenous receptors in the live mouse brain in minutes nature.com/articles/s4158…

The least thing we could do is to bring up the decency to offer the paper to the journal that published a theoretical proposal that our emperical studies proved invalid. Hopefully the competitor will like it better. Fingers crossed!