Why should medicinal chemists use software?
What exactly is a medicinal chemist’s role today? Firstly, let’s define a medicinal chemist’s role – to design and synthesise…
Rapamycin, a well-known macrocyclic natural product with myriad biological activities, has been the subject of intense study since its first isolation and characterisation over five decades ago.
Rapamycin has been found to adopt a single conformation in the solid state (both when protein bound and uncomplexed) and exists as a mixture of two conformations in solution. Early work established that the major conformer in solution is the trans amide isomer but left the minor conformer mostly uncharacterised. Since that time, it has been widely accepted that the minor conformer of rapamycin is the cis amide, based solely on analogy to FK-506, another potent immunosuppressive compound with some shared key structural elements.
To address this long-standing and unresolved question, the solution structure of the minor conformer of rapamycin was investigated using a combination of NMR techniques and computational methods and determined to be a trans amide species with rotation about the ester linkage.
What exactly is a medicinal chemist’s role today? Firstly, let’s define a medicinal chemist’s role – to design and synthesise…
The agrochemical industry is facing growing challenges around resistance, stringent regulations, and pressures to reduce the time and cost of…
Pairing AI with human expertise We present a novel AI compound optimisation system, designed to include human oversight as a…