Joshua Kubiak

The Research Internship in Science & Engineering Program (RISE) provides academically motivated high school seniors the opportunity to conduct university-level research in state-of-the-art laboratories.

In the summer of 2011, Joshua Kubiak, a senior from the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts (Natchitoches, LA), joined the laboratory of Professor Scott Schaus to conduct research for 3 months on Asymmetric Conjugate Addition of Ortho-Quinone Methides as a Pathway to Communesin Analogs.

Professor Scott Schaus

Under the mentorship of Professor Schaus and graduate student, Yi Luan, Joshua made a molecular scaffold which can then be built upon to create chemical compounds with potential medicinal applications. The quality of his research has been recognized by a Siemens Foundation Award.

Joshua is the first student from his school to be named a Regional Finalist in the Siemens Competition, and he plans to pursue a career in drug design and development.

Professor John Porco

The Porco Research Group has received a 4-year, $1.2 million award from the National Institutes of Health for their proposal, Chemical Synthesis of Bioactive Flavonoid and Xanthone-Derived Natural Products.

Undertaken in conjunction with biological collaborators, including Professor Tom Gilmore (BU Biology) and Dr. John Beutler of the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research, the goal of the research is to develop new chemical methodologies to enable the synthesis of bioactive flavonoid and xanthone-derived natural products that could lead to biologically active antitumor and anti-infective agents. Specifically, such agents will be useful as novel pharmacological therapies and as cytotoxic agents against both human cancers and malaria.

Their aims include total syntheses of anticancer agents such as the kuwanons and related prenylflavonoid Diels-Alder natural products as well as the bioactive tetrahydroxanthones blennolides A and B.

The award enables an exciting new research direction for Professor Porco and his collaborators involving the use of nanoparticles in organic reactions, asymmetric catalysis, and novel cycloaddition strategies.

Professor Ramesh Jasti

In its Noteworthy Chemistry page, the American Chemical Society website has highlighted the work of Professor Ramesh Jasti and his Research Group on the blue shift of Cyclo-p-phenylene emissions as a nanohoop size increases.

The emission color of an inorganic semiconductor quantum dot shifts bathochromically with increasing particle size. Similarly, the luminescence color of a linear p-phenylene (LPP) oligomer red-shifts with increasing chain length. [n]Cyclo-p-phenylenes (CPPs) are cyclic forms of LPPs, or “nanohoops”.

Cyclo-p-phenylene emissions blue-shift as ring size increases

The aim of their work is to determine how the emission color of CPPs change with ring size.

Dr Bjoern Reinhard Media.EU Interview

Research Media.EU disseminates information about advances in innovation to the wider scientific, technology, and research communities. Among its focus areas is Nanotechnology and US Research.

Recently, they interviewed Professor Bjoern Reinhard about his work on Epidermal Growth Factor Receptors (EGFRs), which are important cancer biomarkers, and which Research Media has identified as an important innovation in nanotechnology.

In addition to obtaining Professor Reinhard’s insights, the article described in detail the impact of this work and profiled the Reinhard Laboratory. To download a PDF of the interview/profile, click here.

Professor Straub Visiting Scholar Program

The Phi Beta Kappa’s Visiting Scholar Program (VSP) offers undergraduates the opportunity to spend time with some of America’s most distinguished scholars. It aims to contribute to the intellectual life of the campus by making possible an exchange of ideas between the Visiting Scholars and the resident faculty and students.

Professor John Straub is one of the 14 scholars selected by the 2011-2012 VSP Committee.  Visiting eight schools (five in Fall 2011 and three in Spring 2012), he spends two days at each,  giving a public lecture, meeting with undergraduates and faculty members, and participating in classroom discussions and seminars.

The schools on his itinerary are:

• Wake Forest University
• Florida State University
• Colorado College
• University of South Dakota
• Penn State University
• University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• Denison College
• Gettysburg College

Professor Straub’s research focuses on the development and use of mathematical and computational models to uncover the principles governing the fundamental processes of energy transfer, signaling, folding, misfolding, and aggregation that underlie protein function. His excellence as an educator has been recognized by Boston University by Gitner and Metcalf Awards. Committed to scientific outreach and communication, he has served as chair of the Theoretical Chemistry Subdivision of the American Chemical Society and as president of the Telluride Science Research Center, as well as on advisory panels to the Pinhead Institute, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Professor Scott Schaus

ScienceDaily, has featured the research of a team of Boston University scientists in which they identified a novel compound that inhibits viruses from replicating.

The findings, which were published online in the Journal of Virology, could lead to the development of highly targeted compounds to block the replication of poxviruses, such as the emerging infectious disease, Monkeypox.

Investigators from the Boston University School of Medicine (Dr. Ken Dower and Dr. John Connors) teamed with Professor Scott Schaus to use a library of chemicals from the CMLD-BU to identify compounds that could stop vaccinia from replicating inside human cells.

Professor Schaus is Associate Professor in the Boston University Department of Chemistry. The Center for Chemical Methodology and Library Development at Boston University (CMLD-BU) is an National Institutes of Health Funded Center of Excellence in the area of chemical methodology and library development.

Read the ScienceDaily article at:

• http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120103135502.htm

Professor Ramesh Jasti

Professor Ramesh Jasti was chosen by the editorial boards of Synlett, Synthesis, and Synfacts as one of the Thieme Chemistry Journal Awardees for 2011.

Awardees are loosely defined as promising young Professors at or near the beginning of their career. Each year a number of Professors are chosen to receive free print and electronic subscriptions of all three journals as a gesture of encouragement.

Details about Professor Jasti’s research is available at the Jasti Research Group’s website.

Professor Mark Grinstaff

Professor Mark Grinstaff is a recipient of one of the first Boston University MSE Innovation Grants for his research proposal Real-time control of drug release from superhydrophobic biomaterials using clinical ultrasound.

These awards from Boston University’s College of Engineering, Division of Materials Science & Engineering aim to encourage innovation and risk taking.

Their research provides strong evidence that Flavin Adenine Dinucleotide (FAD) plays a structural role in the formation of tetrameric AidB. While their studies clearly show FAD-dependent oligomerization of AidB, they do not address whether FAD also has a catalytic function. However, the picture of AidB that is emerging invokes a role for the DNA-binding domain in localization of AidB to specific genes, while the protective function appears to reside elsewhere on the protein.

In future work, the collaborators will investigate whether this protective function resides with FAD or whether FAD was retained in the evolutionary process solely for its ability to stabilize the AidB tetramer.

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants R01-GM072663 (to Sean Elliott) and P30-ES002109 (to Catherine Drennan) and National Science Foundation Grant MCB-0543833 (Drennan). Professor Drennan is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

The paper is available at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/bi201340t, or click on the image below.

a, Selective formation of perhydroisoindoles, perhydroisoquinolines or morpholinones with phenylalanine as a reaction partner: (i) phenylalanine (2.0 equiv.), M(OTf)n (50 mol%), DTBMP (1.5 equiv.), toluene, 60 °C; (ii) NaOH (2.0 M), tetrahydrofuran, room temperature, 6 h. DTBMP, 2,6-di-tert-butyl-4-methylpyridine; Phe, phenylalanine. b, Molecular models of phenylalanine-derived morpholinones 18 and 21.

“Overall, these studies should pave the way for work to identify pharmacological tools for use in CNS research, oncology, and as anti-infective agents,” said John A. Porco, Jr., professor of chemistry at Boston University. “These studies also will enable future studies to remodel additional natural product scaffolds to access novel therapeutic agents.”

In the search for novel biologically active molecules, DOS strategies break through the limitation of traditional library synthesis by sampling new chemical space. Many natural products can be regarded as useful starting points for DOS, wherein stereochemically rich core structures may be reorganized into chemotypes that are distinctly different from the parent structure. Ideally, to be suited to library applications, such transformations should be general and involve few steps.

With this objective in mind, Porco and colleagues including Professor John Snyder and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Brad Balthaser successfully remodeled the highly oxygenated natural product fumagillol in several ways using a reaction-discovery-based approach. In reactions with amines, excellent selectivity in a bis-epoxide opening/cyclization sequence was obtained using the appropriate metals catalysts forming either perhydroisoindole or perhydroisoquinoline products. Perhydroisoindoles were further remodelled to other complex structures including novel benzoxazepines.

The Center for Chemical Methodology and Library Development at Boston University (CMLD-BU) is a research center funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences ( NIGMS ) focused on the discovery of new methodologies to produce novel chemical libraries of unprecedented complexity for biological screening. The goal of the CMLD-BU is to explore and expand the diversity of small-molecule libraries by creating general, useful protocols for stereocontrolled synthesis. See the CMLD-BU’s website for more information.