In this manuscript we report a critical evaluation of the ability of natural DNA to mediate the nitroaldol (Henry) reaction at physiological temperature in pure water. Under these conditions, no background reaction took place (i.e., control experiment without DNA). Both heteroaromatic aldehydes (e.g., 2-pyridinecarboxaldehyde) and aromatic aldehydes bearing strong or moderate electron-withdrawi...

Groups of pregnant rats were maintained on either a histidine-high diet, or received periodic injections of C-nitromethane, or they received both treatments throughout gestation. Later, the offspring were tested in an open field for activity in a maze-learning task and retested for the retention of the maze habit. Results showed that both nitromehane injections and histidine-high diets resulted...

2010 marked the 50th anniversary of the use of selectivity triangles to characterize chromatographic phases. Such plots ultimately identify and quantify the blend of intermolecular interactions that occur between solutes and solvents/phases. The first chromatographic triangle was proposed by Brown and applied to GC stationary phases. Snyder then developed the influential solvent selectivity tri...

Gene duplication and fusion are among the primary natural processes that generate new proteins from simpler ancestors. Here we adopted this strategy to evolve a promiscuous homohexameric 4-oxalocrotonate tautomerase (4-OT) into an efficient biocatalyst for enantioselective Michael reactions. We first designed tandem-fused 4-OT allow independent sequence diversification of adjacent subunits by d...

The Michael addition of nitromethane to cinnamaldehyde has been computationally studied in the absence of a catalyst and the presence of a biotinylated secondary amine by a combined computational and experimental approach. The calculations were performed at the density functional theory (DFT) level with the M06-2X hybrid functional, and a polarizable continuum model has been employed to mimic t...