Okay, that makes my head ache. And thank goodness, Steven Trainoff, director of engineering at Wyatt Technology assures me that even if I don’t exactly know what zeta potential is, I could still appreciate the importance of an instrument they are introducing at Pittcon 2010, the Möbiuζ, which Wyatt claims can more precisely and easily measure the electrophoretic mobility of proteins than other methods.

Accurate measurement of protein electrophoretic mobility—which is related to the zeta potential—is especially important in formulating protein drugs. That’s because protein drugs must be charged in a formulation. The charge must be high enough to ensure that proteins are stable—individual molecules repel each other—but not so high that not enough molecules can be crammed in the formulation. It’s therefore critical to know the charge on the molecule, which can be inferred from the electrophoretic mobility.

Now, many instruments out there can measure electrophoretic mobility, Trainoff says, but they are not good with small proteins, such as the 14.4-kilodalton lysozyme, in the high concentration that they exist in a formulation. That’s because as proteins become smaller, the noise from diffusion becomes too much. Wyatt’s new optical instrument solves this problem by using an array of 30 photodiode detectors instead of the usual single detector. The massively parallel detection system means faster detection and higher sensitivity than is possible with other instruments. For example, Wyatt’s Möbiu? can determine the electrophoretic mobility of a 1-mg/mL sample of immunoglobulin G in about 30 seconds.

Watch out for the March 29 issue for C&EN’s official coverage of Pittcon 2010. Senior Correspondent Stu Borman will summarize the highlights and trends, Senior Correspondent Steve Ritter will compile the most noteworthy instruments on display, and Senior Editors Celia Henry and Mitch Jacoby will report from the technical sessions.

I completed my chemistry education without ever seeing, let alone using, an NMR instrument, and I’m so excited that high school and college students can actually use, touch, and manipulate the machine instead of just learning how to read and interpret the spectra, thanks to affordable and low-maintenance products such as those from Anasazi.

Don Bouchard, president of Anasazi, tells me that Anasazi FT-NMRs are ideal for the education market because they do not use superconducting magnets that need gases and cryogenic conditions to operate. The company does have a few industry customers, he says, for applications that can be optimally executed with the 60- and 90-MHz instruments. The
difference in price, according to Don, is significant: about $100,000 for an Anasazi instrument, including a five-year warranty vs about $225,000 + $15-30,000/per year in maintenance costs for a 400-MHz spectrometer with a superconducting magnet.

Anasazi NMR spectrometers are installed at three U.S. high schools and many colleges, including at least 20 community colleges in California, Don says.

Although Anasazi’s primary customers are from academia, Don and his wife, Julie, are at Pittcon in hopes of attracting customers from industry and government labs. Those of you chemistry teachers with some Department of Education Title III money might want to talk to them.

Herrema

Whitney

We just finished from the first ever C&EN luncheon at Pittcon, attended by 100 guests. Not a bad crowd, considering that Tuesday is the second day of the exhibition. Our luncheon guest speakers were Frank Witney, president and CEO of Dionex, and Greg Herrema, senior vice president and president of analytical instruments at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Both made a strong case of the complexity of analytical challenges in the 21st century, as well as the ability of the instrumentation/analytics to develop new methods and tools to meet these challenges. So far so good.

At Q&A period, though, not one person in the audience asked a question. What’s with that? Are people too busy, shy, wary to participate? Any ideas about how to encourage discussion during a luncheon?

Altogether, the luncheon was fine. As moderator, I asked a question with several follow ups that I think the speakers and the audience appreciated.

I’m still figuring out zeta potential, but I have to catch my flight back to Washington, DC now.

Photo credit (both): Peter Cutts Photography

Instead of mints, ballpens, or any of the usual freebie trinkets at exhibitions to get people to stop at their booth, Heidolph believes that Demo for Donations will attract more traffic because, as O’Connor’s explains, it offers attendees “a way to give something back to the community.” I warned O’Connor that the San Francisco might attract more than 12,000 people, and Heidolph could be deluged with sign ups. O’Connor’s expectations are conservative, about 1,500.

Well, ACS national meeting attendees, perhaps you can help O’Connor exceed expectations. Again the place to do something good for Haiti in San Francisco is booth #1110.

From Heidolph, I next visited Wyatt Technologies. They’re excited about a new instrument that measures something related to zeta potential and has a key application in protein drug formulation. I’ll tell more about this advance in Part 3. Right now I have to understand what zeta potential is. Can anyone help?

I’ve had interesting conversations since the first function I attended, the Waters Symposium Dinner last night. There I met James A. de Haseth, a senior partner of a company based in Georgia called Light Light Solutions. It makes instruments that help analyze fibers as they are processed for various uses, including as alternatives to glass. De Haseth tells me the company is working with Canadian groups that are interested in natural fibers such as flax as superstrong, superlight materials for industrial applications.

Another interesting conversation was with Patricia A. Bordell, Pittcon’s chair for shortcourses. She works with the College Board, the organization best known for the SAT and the Advanced Placement Program. Bordell goes around the country and the world to train teachers who teach AP and pre-AP chemistry. The push now by the College Board, she says, is to train chemistry teachers to apply inquiry-based learning in pre-college chemistry classrooms.

I have not been to a Pittcon since three years ago, and I find it pleasing that the familiar hallmarks of Pittcon are still around, such as the trays of apples in the exhibit area and the shuttles that go back and forth the center aisle to move attendees from one end of the exhibition area to the other. I did remember to bring comfortable shoes.

At the exhibition hall, the people I talked to give the impression of optimism. First up was Kristof O’Connor, product manager of Heidolph Brinkmann LLC, a manufacturer of such staple laboratory equipment as rotary evaporators and magnetic stirrers. Heidolph did “well during the recession,” O’Connor tells C&EN, “exceeding sales expectations by 3.5%.” Heidolph’s attitude, O’Connor explains, was to work with customers within their budgets–so if a customer bought a second-hand equipment, Heidolph will help them make it work–with the hope when money becomes available and customers are ready to make new purchases, they would go back to Heidolph. Heidolph saw a significant effect of the Obama Administration’s stimulus money, O’Connor says, with increased business from beneficiaries of NIH and NSF largesse, military research facilities, public universities, and companies in the alternative-fuel business. Demand for evaporators was high from companies trying to make biodiesel from algae.

But what O’Connor really is excited about is what Heidolph plans to do at the ACS National Meeting in San Francisco, which they are calling “Demo for Donations.” More about that in my next update.

Photo credit: Cutts Photography

Yeah yeah. I know I’m not the first to grin, groan, or comment about the puns, pop references, and general goofiness ACIE puts into its online abstracts. Many a blogger (Derek Lowe, Excimer, “Phil,” and Chiral Jones ) have also, um, “admired” ACIE’s ability to bring Shakespeare (“Double, double, no toil and trouble”), Star Trek (“Beam me up,” twice), the X-files (“The truth is out there“), and the disembodied voice from the London Underground (“Mind the gap”) into the world of chemistry. The journal has even gotten pretty risqué of late with “Metal ménage à trois” and “Balls galore!”

But Mannich Monday followed soon on the heels of the caption “The Write Stuff,” which permitted the New Kids On The Block hit–(oh yes, here’s the video)–to breach my consciousness for the first time in 20 years—a particularly traumatic reminder of the boy band phenomenon.

So much so, that I had to meet the evil mastermind behind it all.

So I contacted the friendly folks at ACIE, asking whether I could interview (and then, um, perhaps, hound) the person responsible for all the journal’s quirky little abstract captions.

You can imagine my palpable disappointment when Guy Richardson, one of ACIE’s senior associate editors broke the news that the journal’s doozies, like most of science, aren’t the work of a lone genius, but the output of many minds. According to Richardson, “The majority of these texts are indeed the handiwork of the editors (there are about a dozen Ph.D. chemists who work for ACIE, all of whom are native English speakers), but some very good texts do, in fact, come from the authors, and we are always very grateful to authors who join in the fun.”

Yet someone had come up with the Mannich Monday gem, and that someone, I found, is an ACIE editor named Andrew Kelly. He’s only been on staff for a few months “but clearly has a knack for this kind of thing,” Richardson notes. So kudos to you, Dr. Kelly. And here’s a challenge: Try slipping Walk Like An Egyptian into an ACIE caption, given its (remote) chemical connection. (The guy who wrote the pop hit is brother to the chemist who did alot of the early bench work for Visudyne, a macular degeneration drug.)

While we’re on the topic of the humor hot spot of Weinheim, Germany, where ACIE’s headquarters is located, I’ve received a few inquiries about whether the German version of the journal has abstracts that are just as punny. The answer, I fear, is no.

Many of the German abstract titles have a nice alliterative ring to them, and there are definitely a few puns (one about ruthenium employs the element’s symbol: “Ru-ndum erneuert,” which means “completely refurbished” and is possibly droll if you read the article), but there are no thigh-slapping groaners–that I could find.

It would be unfair to expect a snappy German translation of “Just another Mannich Monday” because it’s in reference to an English pop tune. But the risqué “Metal ménage a trois,” which needs no translation, was skipped in favor of “Die Kraft dreier Metalle,” meaning “the power of three metals.” Ah well.

Fearing that my German skills aren’t good enough to catch subtle hilarity, I recruited several German chemists whose sense of humor I hold in high regard to help me scan the German abstracts. The humor task force agreed with my general consensus… but we are happy to be challenged by someone who wants to dig deeper into the archives. Time to ante-up, German speakers.

Although ACS offices have been closed all week, C&EN is still operating, and we do need to eat. Venturing into the tempest, Deputy Editor-in-Chief Maureen Rouhi, Associate Editor Linda Wang, and I went to pick up lunch for the seven of us who stayed in hotels in town or braved the commute to get to headquarters and produce the magazine on schedule. On our way back with the victuals, we encountered this fellow shoveling the sidewalk in front of the hotel/restaurant.

C&EN Enjoys Snoverkill

Most people in DC seem to have taken a light-hearted outlook to the past couple Snowpocalypses, unlike the first one in December, when a cop pulled a gun at a snowball fight. This fellow chuckled and was very happy to have his picture taken with Linda. As quoted from a fellow C&ENer who saw this photo, “Linda looks like she’s about to happily bonk the equally happy grinning dude! Reminds me of Japanese TV!”

These not-so-little green men are pushing for Japan to pledge a specific amount to help developing countries address climate change.

There’s IndyAct, a group of young people from the Middle East. They want the world to know that Saudi efforts to protect and maintain the petroleum industry aren’t representative of the entire Arab world. Their campaign is Can’t Drink Oil.

These red-suited folks are among many who believe the industrialized world owes a debt to developing countries for pumping greenhouse gases into the global atmosphere for so many decades. But U.S. Special Envoy Todd Stern rejects the notion that rich countries owe climate reparations to poor ones.

Attracting a crowd every day at 6 p.m. is the Fossil of the Day award to recognize to the countries that environmentalists deem as the worst performers in the previous day’s negotiations. Handing out these booby prizes is the Climate Action Network, a coalition of about 500 non-profit groups from around the world. Click on this link to see the shows.

And of course, the animal icon of global warming is here too:

For instance, this group of church women also want action on climate change:

Meanwhile, participants entering the climate change meeting in Copenhagen must pass a dedicated group of activists who have stood outside in the cold for the last three days promoting a singular solution:

These vegetarians, associated with spiritual leader Supreme Master Ching Hai, are passing out a bag filled with their literature. They are promoting a change in diet as a way to cut emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from livestock operations.

Many people inside the conference center are sporting those bags. They perhaps are a brief fashion trend here in Copenhagen:

The vegetarians may have a tough time selling their idea in Denmark, a major producer of pork.

Inside the convention center where the negotiations are taking place, there’s little evidence that the message on the bags is having an effect. Cafes scattered through this enormous complex are doing a booming business selling open-face roast beef sandwiches and roast pork entrees to hungry participants.

Fraser-Liggett at NIH (Drahl/C&EN)

Plenty of strategies for tackling obesity are on the table lately, but here’s one that might be new to you– study the Amish.

It makes perfect sense, when you hear Claire Fraser-Liggett talk about it. She’s a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, and is in the first year of work on the project together with colleague Alan Shuldiner. Yesterday, she brought up the work during her talk at the tenth anniversary symposium for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at NIH.

The Amish are only part of the story, though. The star players are the microbial communities that reside inside them and in every human being, particularly gut microflora. C&EN has covered work on the human microbiome extensively, noting that the bugs help us take care of metabolic business that our genome doesn’t encode, and might be the key to understanding not only obesity, but other ailments such as Crohn’s disease.

One of the most useful tools for studying gut microbes’ roles are gnotobiotic mice- mice raised in germ-free environments. Researchers such as Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University in St. Louis (who also gave a talk at the symposium) have shown that these mice are a sort of tabula rasa where researchers can implant gut microbe communities and see what happens when the mice are fed different diets or subjected to some other lifestyle change. Things started to get interesting when they realized they could implant microbes that come from human guts, not just other mice’s.

Studies of these so-called humanized mice suggest that gut microflora have some influence over obesity. Give germ-free mice a dose of gut microflora from an obese person and you get mice that start looking tubby.

So where do the Amish come in? Well, getting gut microflora samples from a relatively isolated gene pool helps researchers understand how inheritance makes a difference in gut microbe makeup. It helps that the Old Order Amish community she’s studying are meticulous genealogy record-keepers.

In thinking about obesity, Fraser-Liggett is intrigued by some of the social aspects of meals in Amish country– women often have communal kitchens, making several dishes and each taking the same food back home to their families.

Despite their culture and religious beliefs, which lead the Amish to reject modern technology, “they are some of the most willing research subjects you’ll find,” Fraser-Liggett tells C&EN. The team had to have the studies vetted by the community elders before they were allowed to proceed, but the Amish “see the research as something for the greater good,” she says.

It’s shaping up to be an interesting study, but Fraser-Liggett cautions that no one study can be the final word on what causes obesity or how to treat it. “Bear in mind that obesity is a complex disease, with microbiota as one component,” she says. “It’s naive to think that by studying this one thing that everything will become clear.”