Never Gonna Give You Up – Current Developments in Covalent Protein Kinase Inhibitors

Covalent inhibitors have recently seen a revival in medicinal chemistry. Inhibitors addressing non-catalytic cysteine residues with weakly reactive electrophiles have been very successfully employed to target protein kinases, one of the major druggable protein families. Here we provide an overview of irreversible and reversible covalent protein kinase inhibitors in clinical development and beyond. We further spotlight recent advances in targeting amino acids other than cysteine and the reactive groups utilized in covalent protein kinase inhibitors

Improved Heterosis Prediction by Combining Information on DNA- and Metabolic Markers

Background: Hybrids represent a cornerstone in the success story of breeding programs. The fundamental principle underlying this success is the phenomenon of hybrid vigour, or heterosis. It describes an advantage of the offspring as compared to the two parental lines with respect to parameters such as growth and resistance against abiotic or biotic stress. Dominance, overdominance or epistasis based models are commonly used explanations. Conclusion/Significance: The heterosis level is clearly a function of the combination of the parents used for offspring production. This results in a major challenge for plant breeders, as usually several thousand combinations of parents have to be tested for identifying the best combinations. Thus, any approach to reliably predict heterosis levels based on properties of the parental lines would be highly beneficial for plant breeding. Methodology/Principal Findings: Recently, genetic data have been used to predict heterosis. Here we show that a combination of parental genetic and metabolic markers, identified via feature selection and minimum-description-length based regression methods, significantly improves the prediction of biomass heterosis in resulting offspring. These findings will help furthering our understanding of the molecular basis of heterosis, revealing, for instance, the presence of nonlinear genotype-phenotype relationships. In addition, we describe a possible approach for accelerated selection in plant breeding

The chemistry and biology of mycolactones

Mycolactones are a group of macrolides excreted by the human pathogen Mycobacterium ulcerans, which exhibit cytotoxic, immunosuppressive and analgesic properties. As the virulence factor of M. ulcerans, mycolactones are central to the pathogenesis of the neglected disease Buruli ulcer, a chronic and debilitating medical condition characterized by necrotic skin ulcers. Due to their complex structure and fascinating biology, mycolactones have inspired various total synthesis endeavors and structure–activity relationship studies. Although this review intends to cover all synthesis efforts in the field, special emphasis is given to the comparison of conceptually different approaches and to the discussion of more recent contributions. Furthermore, a detailed discussion of molecular targets and structure–activity relationships is provided.ISSN:1860-539

tert-Butyl N-[(3R,4R)-1-(2-cyanoacetyl)-4-methylpiperidin-3-yl]-N-methylcarbamate

The piperidine ring of the title compound, C15H25N3O3, adopts a slightly distorted chair conformation with the cis substituents displaying an N—C—C—C torsion angle of 43.0 (3)°. The cyano group (plane defined by C—C—C[triple-bond]N atoms) is bent slightly out of the plane of the amide group by 13.3 (2)°. The carbamate group is oriented at a dihedral angle of 60.3 (5)° relative to the amide group