Researchers at Yale University have developed a new way of exposing the atomic attachments that keep complex molecules in precise alignment. The new method could provide insight into the mechanics of a variety of molecular structures, potentially aiding efforts to manipulate them for drug discovery and other purposes.
Researchers at Yale University have developed a new way of exposing the atomic attachments that keep complex molecules in precise alignment. The new method could provide insight into the mechanics of a variety of molecular structures, potentially aiding efforts to manipulate them for drug discovery and other purposes. "The method appears likely to become a central tool for the characterization of processes that depend on supramolecular associations," said Mark Johnson, a Yale chemistry professor and the principal investigator of the technique, which is described in a paper published this month . Supramolecular associations are interactions taking place between molecules, rather than within them. Yale has filed a patent application for the technique, which Johnson's team calls cryogenic infared spectroscopy. At core, the new method involves freezing non-covalently-bonded molecules in isolation to generate a molecular-level snapshot of exactly how they attach to each other. These are molecules bonded by relatively weak forces compared with other types of molecular attachments.
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