Discovery research isolating products

While Joseph Priestley generally receives credit for the discovery of oxygen, it was Carl Sheele (1742-1786) who probably deserves credit as the first to isolate oxygen. Scheele was a Swede who became interested in chemistry during his apprenticeship as an apothecary. Scheele acquired his own pharmacy and during the process researched the production of different medicines. Scheele realized that common air contained... 

Shorter discovery timelines and accelerated development expectations have hindered the traditional approaches for natural products research. Furthermore, emphasis on chemical diversity presents a great challenge in this area, particularly because traditional natural products screening programs focus on one source of chemical diversity such as microorganisms or plants. Still, the primary issue remains how to assay this ideal source of new, biologically active compounds within the current timeframe necessary for modern drug discovery research. At the heart of this issue is the fact that traditional isolation and scale-up procedures are inefficient and often become the bottleneck in natural products dereplication. 

Research into elastin, its properties, and the fiber formation was for a considerable period of time hindered due to its insolubihty. However, discovery of the soluble tropoelastin precursor made new investigations possible. The tropoelastin protein can be isolated from copper-deficient animals. However, this is a very animal-unfriendly and low yielding process [2]. Therefore, it is preferred to obtain tropoelastin from overexpression in microbial hosts such as Escherichia coli (E. coli). Most studies are thus based on tropoelastin obtained via bacterial production. 

The isolation of physiologically active natural products and the determination of the chemical basis for their activity, the study of insect biochemistry, and the investigation of the chemical basis for host selection are current areas of research activity which should be of particular interest to the pesticide chemist for it may be anticipated that an important "spin-off" of this research will be the discovery of new and safer organic pesticides. It may also be anticipated that a substantial number of these new pesticides will incorporate that most versatile element, sulfur. 

In 1886, Henri Moissan achieved the isolation of elemental fluorine, and this discovery was awarded twenty years later by the Nobel Prize (1906). At the time of this discovery, Moissan was working in a place that was not geared toward this kind of research the Faculty of Pharmacy in Paris. These studies were certainly not oriented toward potential commercial products, and Moissan could not imagine the important applications that took place one century later in the field of pharmaceuticals. Indeed, pharmacy and more generally life sciences have become major fields in fluorine chemistry. This story is instructive in the current debate between pure and applied research. 

Discovery of the 90+ K Superconductor "Paul" Chu and coworkers at the University of Houston (during October 1986) carried out the synthesis of (La1.xBax)CuOs.y (Type I) and (La1.xBax)2 Cu04.y (Type II) compounds and isolated superconducting phases exhibiting a sharp decrease in resistivity at 32 K. The best materials, however, showed only a 2% Meissner fraction. By applying pressure to one such product, their forte in superconductor research, they observed an increase in transition temperature of 8 degrees at 14 kbar pressure (see Figure 29). Chu, et al., submitted (156) these results to Physical Review Letters on 15 December 1986, and the publication appeared in the January 26, 1987 issue. 

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