In honor of the formal policy: Thread of alternatives and the context I've used them: Sulfonyl chloride/acyl chloride reactions with amines or alcohols: Have used iPrOAc, MTBE, Et2O, 2-MeTHF Radical halogenation: Dimethylcarbonate Columns: EtOAc/iPrOH mix

My first GS project! Against SN2 dogma, a H-bond-donor catalyst accelerates ion-pair collapse by positioning the Nu/Ephile precisely on the SN2 trajectory. Couldn't have done this without the inimitable Gabriel Lovinger nature.com/articles/s4158…

We are excited to announce that Kurtis Carsch is joining our department! cm.utexas.edu/news/entry/kur…

WAVE, AMGEN Scholars, their mentors, and DICI members had a great first summer social a few weeks back! Thanks to everyone for attending! We look forward to seeing everyone together again soon!

Catch me at #PS38 this week to learn about the latest, unpublished BEAR reactions! I’ll be sharing new backbones beyond β-amino acids with improved yields and fidelity. #NSFfunded

Congrats to Christian Diercks and other members of the Schultz lab on a new error-prone orthogonal replication system in E. coli! biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

bioRxiv: Nonenzymatic, prebiotic aminoacylation couples chirality of RNA and protein dlvr.it/TBFDcr

📸 A photo with my WAVE undergrad mentees. A highlight of summer 2024 has been mentoring these students during their summer research experiences at Caltech.

Melissa Ramirez Caltech WAVE of the future!

I’m a huge fan of peptide synthesis technology, but I’ve always dreamt of making bonds beyond amides and esters in biopolymers. In our pursuit, I discovered a monomer that can be incorporated into peptides and then reincarnate itself into a diketone: shorturl.at/3Ex2O 1/

New preprint: "Ribosomal Synthesis of Ketone-containing Peptide Backbone via O to C Acyl Shift" chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxi… NSF Center for Genetically Encoded Materials Carly Schissel U.S. National Science Foundation Francis Group 🧪 College of Chemistry Schepartz Lab

I am at the “digging through PhD theses for unpublished data/more detailed protocols” point of my degree… so for the senior grad students writing at the moment and putting in extra effort on something that might seem silly, know that you are appreciated 😭🙏

I’m very excited to share (a bit belatedly) this mechanistic story, published last week in Science Magazine: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

NOT LIKE US | Might write this for the doctorate this #BlackInChem Week! | Coming Soon this August 11th - 17th 😗↕️

grad school version

Me standing in line at the campus coffeeshop after students have returned for the fall semester:

How do you turn a deletion into an insertion? In our latest, Myojeong shows that the anomeric amide can N-delete *and* re-aminate a sulfinate intermediate, enabling an overall SO2 insertion. Another great collab with Christopher Kelly and J&J! doi.org/10.26434/chemr…

Nick Chiappini 🏳️‍🌈 Armin Durmisevic If you haven’t found a Russian reference, you haven’t dug deep enough

Out now in Chem , we collaborate with Piel Lab to discover a prenyltransferase+terpene cyclase fusion enzyme that modifies Trp residues in RiPPs to yield complex steroid-like scaffolds! Congrats to Florian Hubrich, Sanath Kandy for leading this!🎉authors.elsevier.com/c/1jjdi8jWHELG…

We're excited to share the work led by Dr. Peter Winegar on the complete biosynthesis of verazine. This accomplishment marks the #1st heterologous steroidal alkaloid produced in engineered yeast, unlocking future drug development. Congrats, Peter!! 🧬🎉 sciencedirect.com/science/articl…