Papers I am reading ...

It has been a big week at Sit and Spin.  Last Tuesday morning just after I posted my review of an Angew. Chem. paper on NMR of very large protein complexes (http://sitspinnmr.blogspot.com/2014/02/1-mega-dalton-and-beyond.html), I jumped over to twitter to publicize the blog.  I don't remember the exact chain of events, but eventually my blog was mentioned by @SeeArrOh, an organic chemist and blogger (http://www.justlikecooking.blogspot.com) with a wide readership.  As a consequence, the blog got more hits in one day than I had in the previous three months combined!  

In parallel, I saw an interesting news article on Nature (http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7486-123a?WT.ec_id=NATUREjobs-20140206) highlighting the correlation between citations in research blogs and citations in the scientific literature.  This article reminded me why I got into the blogging game.  I think there is a lot of great research being done by hard-working and thoughtful scientists in the field of NMR.  I am concerned that the broader community of chemists is not aware of this work, or at least as aware as they are about work in other branches of chemistry.  Perhaps, in some small way, this blog can help to remedy this problem.  

Additionally, the Nature news article alerted me to the site www.researchblogging.org.  I am ashamed to admit that I was unaware of ResearchBlogging.org and underlying the movement underway in science communications.  This site is such a great aggregate of information.  I have spent so much time digging through it that I went ahead and applied for an account.  I would be honored if the editors include this blog.  

Of course with added attention there will be added pressure to write more posts.  It takes me a while to write a complete critique.  It probably takes almost as much time as it took me to make powerpoint slides for journal club in group meetings back when I was a post-doc.  And I only had to do that a few times per year!  I am trying to get a blog post out every other week.  

In case I don't get the opportunity to discuss all of them, here is a list of papers in my "to blog" pile.  I picked these out of the most prominent journals that publish NMR papers.  The criteria I use is the following: "Does the title and abstract seem interesting to a wide audience?"  If anyone out there finds something that I am missing, please contact me.  

Here is my list.  I'll try to get to two or three of these in the next month or so.

Hyperpolarization without persistent radicals for in vivo real-time metabolic imaging.

Eichhorn et al.

PNAS 2013 110 18064

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18064.long

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24145405

NMR paves the way for atomic level descriptions of sparsely populated, transiently formed biomolecular conformers.

Sekhar A, Kay LE.

PNAS 2013 110 12867

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/32/12867.long

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23868852


Diastereotopic splitting in the 13C NMR spectra of sulfur homofullerenes and methanofullerenes with chiral fragments.

Tulyabaev AR, Tuktarov AR, Khalilov LM.

MRC 2014 52, 3

 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mrc.4027/abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24347398

Biophysical aspects of cyclodextrin interaction with paraoxon.

Soni SD, Bhonsle JB, Garcia GE.

MRC 2014

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mrc.4036/abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24357355 

Solution Structure of a G-quadruplex Bound to the Bisquinolinium Compound Phen-DC3.

Chung WJ, Heddi B, Hamon F, Teulade-Fichou MP, Phan AT.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201308063/abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24356977

Structure elucidation and NMR assignments of two unusual xanthones from Lomatogonium carinthiacum (Wulf) Reichb.

Wang Q, Bao B, Chen Y.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mrc.4024/abstract

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24347400

Structural elucidation and NMR assignments of two new pyrrolosesquiterpenes from Streptomyces sp. Hd7-21.

Liu DZ, Liang BW.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mrc.4031/abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24272978

Automatic assignment of 1H-NMR spectra of small molecules.

Cobas C, Seoane F, Vaz E, Bernstein MA, Dominguez S, Pérez M, Sýkora S.

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mrc.3995/abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24038382