As the Antarctic summer arrives an international team of researchers is set to embark on a mission to study two vast subglacial basins in eastern Antarctica that are both little studied but of potentially huge importance for sea levels under climate change. The polar regions are expected to warm significantly as a result of human-induced climate change because of positive feedback associated wi...

Detoxification of an antifungal monoterpene terpinolene (1) by the plant pathogenic fungus Botrytis cinerea afforded hydroxlyated metabolites 2,3-dihydro-3beta,6beta-dihydroxy-terpinolene (2) (39%) and 2,3-dihydro-1alpha,3alpha-dihydroxy-terpinolene (3) (20%), respectively. Terpinolene showed good levels of antifungal activity while both the metabolites were inactive against another plant patho...

Quorum sensing (QS) is a widespread phenomenon in the microbial world that has important implications in the coordination of population-wide responses in several bacterial pathogens. In Group A Streptococcus (GAS), many questions surrounding QS systems remain to be solved pertaining to their function and their contribution to the GAS lifestyle in the host. The QS systems of GAS described to dat...

We previously reported that water-soluble cyclic selenides can mimic the antioxidative function of glutathione peroxidase (GPx) in water through a simple catalytic cycle, in which the selenide (>Se) is oxidized by H₂O₂ to the selenoxide (>Se=O) and the selenoxide is reduced by a thiol back to the selenide. In methanol, however, the GPx-like activity could not be explained by this simple scenari...