A new approach to the chemical synthesis of oligodeoxynucleotides bearing reporter functional groups at base residues of 3'-end nucleosides is reported. Applications of the 3'-end fluorescently labelled primers for automated DNA sequencing are shown.

The ability to recreate Nature's molecules through chemical synthesis is undoubtedly one of the greatest triumphs of the human imagination. To date, thousands of natural products have been synthesized and targets that looked like an impossible task only recently, such as a single glycoform of erythropoietin, have been reached. An achievement that would have astonished researchers several decade...

SCIENCE sciencemag.org Riedl calls his approach “rationalization,” which he designed to help everyday users understand the robots that will soon be helping around the house and driving our cars. “If we can’t ask a question about why they do something and get a reasonable response back, people will just put it back on the shelf,” Riedl says. But those explanations, however soothing, prompt anoth...

A microfluidic technique for combinatorial chemical synthesis of peptidomimetics has been developed. The new 32step method is fast, automated and includes an integrated magnetic separation of inorganic catalysts from reaction products. This proof-of-concept study should lead to methods for generating libraries of compounds suitable for screening for bioactivity.

In the RNA of hyperthermophiles, which grow optimally between 80 degrees C and 106 degrees C, posttranscriptional modification has been identified as a leading mechanism of structural stabilization. Particularly in the Archaeal evolutionary domain these modifications are expressed as a structurally diverse array of modification motifs, many of which include ribose methylation. Using mass spectr...