Highlights from the December 2006 issues of the American Chemical Society's journal, ACS Chemical Biology, are now available. A link is included below:

http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/acs/index.php?page=chemicalbiology.

Below are just a few of the featured articles and research studies that appear in this month's highlighted double edition.

• HIV continually manages to fight back against the drugs designed to destroy it due to its notorious talent for mutating into resistant strains. Himmel and Arnold report the crystal structure of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase complexed with an inhibitor of RNase H activity, suggesting intriguing new strategies for hitting HIV where it could really hurt.

• Based on a bacterial quorum sensing system, Sun and Nie have created highly sensitive, inducible, artificial genetic circuits. These genetic amplifiers have potential applications in industrial fermentation, gene therapy, and tissue engineering.

• Hang & Ploegh describe azido-E-64, a cell permeable activity based-probe that provided insight into how the pathogen Salmonella eludes destruction by the immune system.

• Cryptophycins are important potential anticancer agents produced by blue-green algae. Magarvey & Sherman present a detailed characterization of the fascinating biosynthetic pathway of this large class of compounds. The analysis provides important chemical and biological tools for the generation of novel cryptophycins with improved anticancer activity.

• The phosphoinositide 3-phosphatase PTEN is known to play a role in the regulation of insulin signaling. Rosivatz & Wolsholski describe the design, synthesis and biological evaluation of several vanadium-based small molecule PTEN inhibitors, creating a potential starting point for the development of PTEN-targeted anti-diabetic therapeutics.
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