Rare-earth-containing magnetic liquid crystals

Rare-earth-containing metallomesogens with 4-alkoxy-N-alkyl-2- hydroxybenzaldimine ligands are reported. The stoichiometry of the complexes is [Ln(LH)3(NO3)3], where Ln is the trivalent rare-earth ion (Y, La, and Pr to Lu, except Pm) and LH is the Schiff base. The Schiff base ligands are in the zwitterionic form and coordinate through the phenolic oxygen only. The three nitrate groups coordinate in a bidentate fashion. The X-ray single- crystal structures of the nonmesogenic homologous complexes [Ln(LH)3(NO3)3], where Ln = Nd(III), Tb(III), and Dy(III) and LH = CH3OC6H3(2-OH)CH=NC4H9, are described. Although the Schiff base ligands do not exhibit a mesophase, the metal complexes do (SmA phase). The mesogenic rare-earth complexes were studied by NMR, IR, EPR, magnetic susceptibility measurements, X-ray diffraction, and molecular modeling. The metal complexes in the mesophase have a very large magnetic anisotropy, so that these magnetic liquid crystals can easily be aligned by an external magnetic field

A fast topological analysis algorithm for large-scale similarity evaluations of ligands and binding pockets

Motivation: With the rapid increase of the structural data of biomolecular complexes, novel structural analysis methods have to be devised with high-throughput capacity to handle immense data input and to construct massive networks at the minimal computational cost. Moreover, novel methods should be capable of handling a broad range of molecular structural sizes and chemical natures, cognisant of the conformational and electrostatic bases of molecular recognition, and sufficiently accurate to enable contextually relevant biological inferences. Results: A novel molecular topology comparison method was developed and tested. The method was tested for both ligand and binding pocket similarity analyses and a PDB-wide ligand topological similarity map was computed. Conclusion: The unprecedentedly wide scope of ligand definition and large-scale topological similarity mapping can provide very robust tools, of performance unmatched by the present alignment-based methods. The method remarkably shows potential for application for scaffold hopping purposes. It also opens new frontiers in the areas of ligand-mediated protein connectivity, ligand-based molecular phylogeny, target fishing, and off-target predictions. Graphical abstract:A novel molecular topology comparison method based on a combined shape distribution and charge binning scheme is presented

Comité national de Cristallographie

Thiry P., Van Meervelt L. Comité national de Cristallographie. In: Bulletin de la Classe des sciences, tome 14, n°1-6, 2003. pp. 204-205

Comité national de Cristallographie

Thiry P., Van Meervelt L. Comité national de Cristallographie. In: Bulletin de la Classe des sciences, tome 14, n°1-6, 2003. pp. 204-205

Structure of the fully modified left-handed cyclohexene nucleic acid sequence GTGTACAC

CeNA oligonucleotides consist of a phosphorylated backbone where the deoxyribose sugars are replaced by cyclohexene moieties. The X-ray structure determination and analysis of a fully modified octamer sequence GTGTACAC, which is the first crystal structure of a carbocyclic-based nucleic acid, is presented. This particular sequence was built with left-handed building blocks and crystallizes as a left-handed double helix. The helix can be characterized as belonging to the (mirrored) A-type family. Crystallographic data were processed up to 1.53 A, and the octamer sequence crystallizes in the space group R32. The sugar puckering is found to adopt the 3H2 half-chair conformation which mimics the C3'-endo conformation of the ribose sugar. The double helices stack on top of each other to form continuous helices, and static disorder is observed due to this end-to-end stacking