Cycloadditions: Lighting the way for cobalt catalysis

Lighting the Way to a Switchless Life

Shinya Inoué: Lighting the way in microscopy

W hen light passes through cells, it is slowed ever so slightly by its encounters with transparent proteins and organelles. The microtubule-based mitotic spindle retards light by a mere 1/100 th of its wavelength, creating constructive and destructive interference patterns that can be observed with specialized optics (1, 2). In the early 1950s, Shinya Inoué used this principle to design a polar...

Dual catalysis in enantioselective oxidopyrylium-based [5 + 2] cycloadditions.

A new method for effecting catalytic enantioselective intramolecular [5 + 2] cycloadditions based on oxidopyrylium intermediates is reported. The dual catalyst system consists of a chiral primary aminothiourea and a second achiral thiourea. Experimental evidence points to a new type of cooperative catalysis with each species being necessary to generate a reactive pyrylium ion pair that undergoe...

News Feature: Lighting the way for dark matter.

In 2015 a team of nuclear physicists in Hungary reported an anomalous bump in the signal from radioactive decays of unstable beryllium-8, corresponding to a putative new particle with 34 times the mass of an electron (1). It was largely overlooked at the time, but a year later US theorists suggested that this might point to a new force felt by darkmatter, hinting that themysterious substance is...

Denise Montell: Lighting the way in border cell migration

D uring Drosophila oogenesis, a group of cells breaks off from the epithelium that envelopes the egg chamber. Squeezing between the gigantic nurse cells, these so-called border cells migrate from the anterior end of the egg chamber to the posterior, where they subsequently form a pore in the developing eggshell. Denise Montell has been studying this process for much of her career (1). Along the...