the power of goo

The title off a german 2004 comedy about a disgrunteld jewish journalist actually lines out german chemist Peter Seebergers work on glycane chemistry at ETH Zürich. While the movie is bristling with witty fast-paced dialogue, Seeberger took a lesson from Merrifield and managed to build the worlds first automated polyglycane synthesizer bringing a faster pace to glycane chemistry. With the importance of glycanes in cell cell interaction this opens new avenues in medicinal chemistry as the tedious step by step synthesis of these sugar polymers can now be accomplished in days instead of months.

More info here on

• Nature
• and at his groups page at ETH

I am looking forward to seeing what comes of his work.