Creating a more powerful antioxidant

The chemists used the new method to make synechoxanthin, a molecule first isolated from bacteria in 2008 that shows great promise as an antioxidant.  Studies suggest that synechoxanthin allows the bacteria that produce it to live and thrive in highly oxidative environments.

Studies on the activity of synechoxanthin have been limited by the difficulty of extracting the molecule from bacterial cultures. The chemists successfully synthesized it from just three types of readily available, highly stable, non-toxic building blocks. Thanks to the ease of ICC, they can produce relatively large quantities of synechoxanthin for study as well as derivatives to test against the natural product.

“Because this building-block-based design is inherently flexible, once we’ve made the natural product, we can make any derivative we want simply by swapping in one different building block, and then using the reverse-polarity ICC to snap them together,” said professor Martin Burke. “That’s where synthesis is so powerful. Oftentimes, the cleanest experiment will require a molecule that doesn’t exist, unless you can piece it together.”

The researchers can also use blocks that have been tagged with a fluorescent or radioactive dye to make it easier to study a particular molecule and its activity.

Source: http://goo.gl/rIqpe

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