Hey guys, I mentioned that I am on sabbatical from July till the end of December, 2013. I will elaborate. For a number of reasons I chose not to leave Toronto but to stay here and concentrate on something that is totally new to me. With this in mind, I joined SGC (Al Edwards, its director, is an old friend of mine).  Here is their website:

http://www.thesgc.org/scientists/groups/toronto

I now work with Elena Dobrovetsky. She is awesome. I am learning a ton about protein crystallography, all the way from expression to mounting of crystals and data collection. I will be posting my progress reports. Just 2 weeks ago we set up 960 crystallizations of some epigenetic domains (more on that later) and got some really nice crystals already (actually only one condition delivered – attrition was high). My ultimate goal is fragment based screening using crystallography. This stuff is a ton of fun. I can hardly be found at my main office (Lash Miller Building), but I am fine with that – if you do a sabbatical, you may as well try to see that there really is a separation from your regular job. I asked my wife “Do you think my students miss me?” and she said “Ha ha ha! No way!!”. I suppose this is true… I am not sad though!

Here is our most recent addition to the lineup of amphoteric reagents. I refer to alpha-boryl isocyanides. These molecules enable synthesis of boron-containing peptides and heterocycles. Adam Zajdlik (about to start his second year of PhD in my lab) developed these species… Check out the photo – these are white solids (and they do not stink the way most isocyanides do… We call them “peer-friendly” isocyanides…)

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201302818/abstract

If you want to know some history, the isocyanides emerged on the heels of some superb foundational work by my former PhD student Zhi He (now doing his post-doctoral work with Tim Jamison at MIT). Zhi developed alpha-boryl aldehydes using MIDA group on boron:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja205910d

We were happy to publish this chemistry in response to questions I have been getting at conferences ever since we disclosed the aziridine aldehyde synthesis with Ryan Hili. People were asking me: “OK… the amine/aldehyde combo is cool, but can you think of a molecule where a carbon nucleophile is orthogonal to the aldehyde group?” Thanks to Zhi, we have an answer!

I want to end this post by saying that the unusual stability of our growing line-up of borylated reagents is due to the MIDA functionality, which has been popularized by Marty Burke (http://www.scs.illinois.edu/burke/). Marty has done some pioneering work with MIDA boronates.

After years of contemplating science blogging, I decided to roll up my sleeves and get going… I think this is where science publishing (at least some of it) is likely heading. This is my main motivation. As well, I just want to let people know about what we do in my lab at the University of Toronto:

http://www.chem.utoronto.ca/wp/yudinlab/

Now that I am on sabbatical until the end of December 2013, I have some more time – so here you go!