Main Platform Molecules

From Biomass to Products via Platform Molecules 3.4.2.1 Identification of Main Platform Molecules... 

The three main platform molecules employed in terpene chemistry are a-pinene and / -pinene, which are extracted from turpentine oil (350000 t a-1) a co-product of paper pulp industry, and limonene extracted from citrus oil (30000 t a-1). 

The second route involves the retrieval of current platform molecules (benzene, toluene, xylenes (BTX), phenols, etc.) by unselective catalytic processes, followed by familiar processes. Here, mainly hydrogenation takes place to remove excess oxygen, yielding aromatic hydrocarbons (BTX, phenols). This will need some time for commercialization as no results with high yields for BTX from genuine lignin are known. Instead, actual research is mainly performed on model components like p-coumaryl, coniferyl, and sinapyl alcohol [7]. 

A variety of catalytic routes have been described in recent years for the chemical transformation of carbohydrates into hydrocarbon liquid fuels and oxygenated biofuels which wiU be discussed in this chapter. Special focus will be brought to the recent progress of integrated processes based on the use of multifunctional catalytic systems without isolation of the platform intermediates. Fig. 13.1 summarizes the main chemical routes for the conversion of cellulosic platform molecules into high-energy-density biofuels. 

The methodology and assay protocols described hereinafter will be limited to the primary applications of the present microfluidic platform and will thus concentrate mainly on the ELISA technique, where the affinity reaction incorporates an antibody to recognise the diagnostic molecule. 

PyMOL is useful for viewing molecules and proteins. Because it is an open source architecture, in principal, it is much more scalable for custom applications than closed source software. Although the project has relatively a limited numbers of applications at this early stage, it is envisioned to eventually become a frill molecular modeling platform. Currently it is primarily a visualization package. Three main use cases are currently envisioned first, to visualize molecule (sdfile) or protein (pdf file), second to create a publication quality figure (static content), and third to enable one to use Pymol as one does Powerpoint for generating movies. 

In this case study, we used the Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) PhysioLab Platform to identify a set of novel targets in the pathophysiology and progression of RA. The results of an initial sensitivity analysis suggested that four main physiologies were responsible for driving the bulk of the disease condition. The results for the quantification of one molecule in particular are presented in table 14.4. 

ChemScreener It is a Java-based platform developed to create diverse but focussed libraries. Tools like SmiLib do not take into account chemical or physico-chemical characteristics of products but rather simply concatenate scaffold molecules and building blocks with single bonds [71]. Often, the libraries created are huge but not chemically meaningful to develop a lead molecule. ChemScreener provides three main modules to use a scaffold extractor library generator, a screener which screens the library for the presence of pharmacophoric, chemophoric and toxico-phoric features. 

Main focus of most pharmaceutical research organizations is to generate or acquire novel compounds and to characterize these in terms of various properties. The generated compound profiles serve as a basis for the conception of a next round of— hopefully—improved molecules. This cycle continues until a clinical candidate has been identified or a project has to be terminated. Most organizations have established a research informatics infrastructure to support these processes. A number of commercial software products are available today in this application area. Depending on the available resources, typical infrastructures rely on one or a combination of multiple commercial platforms that have been customized and extended to fit the specific needs of each organization [1 ]. 

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