Interrupting cyclic dinucleotide-cGAS–STING axis with small molecules

INTERACTION OF PROTEINS WITH SMALL MOLECULES

Cyclic di‐nucleotides: new era for small molecules as adjuvants

The implementation of vaccination as an empiric strategy to protect against infectious diseases was introduced even before the advent of hygiene and antimicrobials in the medical practice. Nevertheless, it was not until a few decades ago that we really started understanding the underlying mechanisms of protection triggered by vaccination. Vaccines were initially based on attenuated or inactivat...

Orientation of molecules with a small dipole moment using cyclic wave packets

A robust and versatile method is demonstrated to maintain, for an arbitrary time, quasiconstant and strong orientation for molecules with minute dipole moments. The procedure is based on submitting molecules in cyclic wave packets to periodic trains of nonresonant pulses in an electrostatic field. We show that approximate cyclic states can be created by suddenly switching off a long laser pulse...

Thinking big with small molecules

Synthetic chemistry has enabled scientists to explore the frontiers of cell biology, limited only by the laws of chemical bonding and reactivity. As we investigate biological questions of increasing complexity, new chemical technologies can provide systems-level views of cellular function. Here we discuss some of the molecular probes that illustrate this shift from a "one compound, one gene" pa...

Targeting RNA with small molecules.

5.1. Binding Sites of the Aminoglycosides 1185 5.2. Importance of Electrostatic Interactions 1185 5.3. Nonionic Interactions 1185 5.4. Pseudo-Base Pair Interactions 1186 5.5. Water-Mediated Contacts 1186 5.6. Shape Complementarity and Conformational Adaptation 1186 6. Assays for Evaluating RNA Binding 1186 6.1. Methods Utilizing Fluorescently Labeled RNA 1186 6.2. NMR-Based Methods 1187 6.3. El...