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(1/9) We had our first year-end "best of" group meeting yesterday! Each lab member presented one of their favorite papers from 2020 in 5 minutes. The variety in topics was staggering. My lab members teach me so much! Here's a summary, so they can teach you too.
Arthur wowed us with a recap of Baran's two-phase synthesis of Taxol, the culmination of a 13-year effort and an incredible piece of natural product synthesis work. @BaranLabReads https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.0c03592
Adam ( @adamcotton92) made us fear for our futures as small molecule chemists (jk!) by presenting some outstanding work from the Bogyo lab ( @mbogyo) on the application of phage display to discover covalent, peptide-based inhibitors . https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0733-7
Quinn showed us how complex the interactions of ribosome inhibitors can actually be, and that multiple inhibitors does not necessarily mean better inhibition, even if they don't share a binding site! Great work from the Bollenbach group. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17734-z
Yoshito reminded us that medicinal chemists continue to find incredible new substitutes for old functional groups with @MykhailiukChem's work on bicyclo[2.1.1]hexanes as ortho-benzene bioisosteres. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.202004183
Caleb highlighted how far chemoselectivity in transition metal-catalyzed cross coupling has come, with work from the @weixgroup enabling selective coupling of aryl tosylates to aryl triflates (!!??). https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.0c04670
Minh presented some extremely creative work from @MacMillan_Lab and Merck on the application of photocatalysis to microenvironment mapping on the cell surface. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6482/1091
Jon presented cell penetrating peptide–antibiotic conjugate work from @jcheng188 and Erik Luijten that highlights the bright future for antibiotic conjugates. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acscentsci.0c00893
And finally, Seul Ki gave us a recap of the fine tuning that has been recently accomplished in bioorthogonal click chemistry, as highlighted in a fantastic, concise review by @jenn_prescher. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41570-020-0205-0
