January
Chemistry World Podcast - January 2010
00.11 - Introduction
02.08 - Non-protein antifreeze helps Arctic beetle chill out
04.22 - Mussel proteins inspire new diabetes treatment
06.53 - Ben Feringa on the future of molecular machines
14.15 - Carbonic acid captured
16.36 - Breaking the strongest bonds
19.18 - Marco Leona on analytical techniques for studying works of art
26.59 - Colour change test for arsenic
28.33 - A pharmaceutical named desire
31.55 - The chemical conundrum: what chemical compound is used in car engine coolant systems and windscreen washing fluid to prevent it from freezing in cold weather?
(Promo)
Brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry, this is the Chemistry World Podcast.
(End Promo)
(00.11 - Introduction)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Hello, welcome to New Year, a new decade and a new edition of the Chemistry World podcast brought to you this month by Phillip Broadwith, Matt Wilkinson and Nina Notman. Coming up, we've got news a new kind of cellular antifreeze that's been found in a beetle in the Arctic and can protect it to as low as -60 degrees C. We'll hear how its works shortly. We'll also be venturing into a world where size really does matter.
Interviewee - _
We built as far as we can tell world's first nanoscale rotary motor, which is kind of a propeller that can rotate either clockwise or counter-clockwise. The energy came from the light. So when we irradiate, the propeller starts to move and you have to realize these motor was the size of one nanometre, one billionth of a meter.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Microscope is not provided. But Ben Feringa will be with us to talk nano, later in the program. Also carbonic acid, the stuff that form when CO2dissolves in water has been under scrutiny this month and chemists have discovered that it is a lot more acidic than they gave credit for.
Interviewee -
Well it says it's a lot stronger than you're chemistry text books at home will have in it. This process is absolutely crucial, important to the carbon cycle. CO2is stored in massive amounts in the oceans. So if when CO2dissolves if it is actually more acidic, the acidification of the oceans is going to be a lot more severe than previously thought.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And what the politicians in Copenhagen made of that? The whole story is coming up, courtesy of Matt Wilkinson. Also on the way, we'll be dipping in paint brush in to the art world, to hear how scientists will be using Raman spectroscopy to probe the origins of ancient works. Hello, I'm Chris Smith. Welcome to Chemistry World.
(Promo)
The Chemistry World Podcast is brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Look us up online at chemistryworld dot org.
(End Promo)
(02.08 - Non-protein antifreeze helps Arctic beetle chill out)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Now most of us eschew the cold with a vengeance, but Phil, scientists have uncovered one creature that probably revels in it?
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Yes, well more than one creature actually Chris. There's a whole family of beetles and fish and toads that can survive really really cold temperatures, not just like Cambridge in the snow, we're talking -60 in the Arctic, the Antarctic and the particular one we're interested in today is the Arctic darkling beetle, which can survive down to -60 degrees.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Well how?
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Well, as with a lot of these animals that can survive in very cold conditions, it has a molecule that helps it stop ice growing in and outside its cells.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
But it isn't that new, is it because we've seen examples of antifreezes in fish, we've had antifreezes in snow fleas from Alaska, Unilever have borrowed antifreeze molecules from bacteria, to make smoother ice cream, so how is this different?
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Well, all of the antifreeze molecules that have been found in other animals so far have been proteins. What makes this one different is that it's not a protein, it's based on sugars and a lipid. In fact the team that we're looking for, lead by Jack Duman from Notre Dame University in Indiana were looking for a protein, the poor student Ken Walters on this project spent two years trying to identify the protein that was responsible for the antifreeze properties. He could get an extract from the beetle which showed antifreeze characteristics, but couldn't find any protein. Eventually they found this other molecule that was responsible.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So tell us what the molecule is and how they think it contributes to the antifreeze effect?
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Okay, so the molecule itself is relatively simple. Its two sugars are xylose and mannose in a little polymer, which they've called zylomanan and in on the ends of that, there's a lipid. They think that the reason the lipids there are is to bind it into the cell membranes because the easiest way to stop ice forming is to bind the crystals on the outside of the cells and stop them from growing.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And of course, one has to ask and you certainly know what about applications?
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Well, now that we know that there's this entirely new class of antifreeze molecules, we can start looking for it in other insects, in other places where antifreeze proteins have been hard to identify. So perhaps other organisms use this kind of molecule instead.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Thank you very much Phil.
(04.22 - Mussel proteins inspire new diabetes treatment)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Now, Nina, talking of animals and how animals can help to do wonderful things for science, interesting news on mussels, the underwater variety and how they're trying to muscle in on tissue repair and even diabetes research. Tell us about this.
Interviewee - Nina Notman
So a group led by Phillip Messersmith at North western University in US has been taking inspiration from marine mussels and the way that they stick themselves to rocks and boathouse to make a new type of medical adhesive that works on the way tissues inside the body, so their glue is based on a brownish polyethylene glycol core which is called catecholoid N-group, it is a catechol group which comes from the marine mussels.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So, basically they are stealing the way in which the mussel glues itself on to things and how does this actually get applied inside the body, what actually happens chemically when it wants to stick something together.
Interviewee - Nina Notman
'Catechol is an aromatic ring with two alcohol groups on it and when it oxidizes it forms carbonyl groups and then that reacts again and this is how the polymers crosslink and that the solidification process of the glue and the groups can then reacts again to form a covalent bond and bond itself to the tissue.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And then what do you do with it?
Interviewee - Nina Notman
The application they've been looking at is pancreatic islet transplantation which is an experimental technique where donor pancreatic cells are implanted into the liver of diabetes sufferers. So, once the cells are inside the body, they can make release insulin which means that the diabetes sufferers no longer need to inject insulin daily.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So, the theory would be you take the cells that you want to put into the diabetic, coat them with this material which then presumably glues them together and then you infuse them into the liver. Why is that better than just infusing the cells in to the liver?
Interviewee - Nina Notman
At the moment when the cells are infused into the liver there is some kind of immune response which stops the cells from working two to three years later, so Phillip Messersmith's group had been looking at different places in the body to infuse the new cells and so far they have tested sticking the new cells to the liver surface, the pancreas surface and also to the surface of fat tissues in mice and they've showed that the cells both stapled and they still work again later and the fat tissue is the best place to stick them.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And the consequence for the mice is that these cells work properly and produce insulin.
Interviewee - Nina Notman
They've tested out for a year and so far yes they do.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So appropriately enough a sticky treatment for a sugary disease, will watch that with more interest, thank you Nina.
(06.53 - Ben Feringa on the future of molecular machines)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And now to the science of the really really tiny.
Interviewee - Ben Feringa
My name is Ben Feringa of the University of Groningen the Netherlands and I am a professor of organic chemistry. Now this field is about building tiny machines, the size of molecules. We are talking about nanometre scale that is one-billions of a metre.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Is size the only major challenge though?
Interviewee - Ben Feringa
The size is certainly a challenge but much more important of all is to control the dynamic behaviour. When you think of the motor in your car, it's extremely important that there is fuel going in that it is moving. It makes a rotary motion, otherwise your car would not drive and what we have to accomplish that the scale of this nanometre size is to design systems, molecules, the two exactly similar kinds of things. So we have to fuel them, we have to control the motion and we have hopefully we are able to perform some work with these tiny machines.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
What sorts of applications have people got in mind for them or what sorts of things have they achieved so far?
Interviewee - Ben Feringa
Yeah, so far there are not that many applications yet, because this is very early days, we first have to design these things and to find out what are exactly the principles you know because you cannot translate from the macroworld, say the machines in all factories and in all cars to this really tiny world nanoscale and molecules, but to realize what is the potential in our body when you go into the cells, there are plenty of machines and motors and they are exactly the similar kind of function, so to transport molecules, pump something through cell membranes, to make it possible that cells can divide etc. So, there are 50 or so different types of motors that have been identified and so if nature may so heavily use of these tiny motors in living organisms it is a bit weird that we don't use at this moment any of this kind of motors, when we think of nanotechnology or nanoscale designs et cetera or a material science. There must be a whole future there. Once we are able to use their properties and this is exactly what we and many other groups are doing now.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
I was just going to say because nature must've solved a lot of your problems for you already, because if you look hard enough in cells, just like you say, you can find beautifully elegant examples of things being done which we dream of in science fiction movies. As you say, this protein motors that move things along nerve cells, 75 millimetres a day, which are the kind of scale we're talking about. It's like taking a rocket to the moon and cells are already doing that.
Interviewee - Ben Feringa
It is astonishing what nature has accomplished and these designs are so beautiful. We have designed in our laboratory a tiny motor, where we try to mimic the flagella motor of the bacteria. I use this example because this is a fantastic design of a complex protein system that makes it moving forward or backward on command. We try to mimic something like that with much more simpler designs and simpler molecules to see how we can move between two spots and then ultimately to transport something from A to B and yes, and we're astonished, but what nature has accomplished in that sense once again, our designs are much less elaborate, but we had less time than nature had, during evolution of course.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Indeed nature's had 4 billion years or so but taken that as a step further, there's an interesting science that you find yourself in isn't it because basically you've got many of the solutions, you know the cells and things can do. They've often got answers to many of problems we would like to solve. You've got to work out how to actually rebuild what cells have already done.
Interviewee - Ben Feringa
Absolutely, but you have to realize that many of these ingenious machines that are used in the cells cannot be used outside the cells as soon for instance the flagella motor of the bacteria, if you take it, these components are out of the cell membrane. They simply don't operate in the proper way anymore. So to build some robust systems that we can use, we have to use other molecules, other materials and redesign them. So there is two big challenges, one is to try to design molecular machines and molecular motors and to find out the basic principles, how does it work, how does it operate. Do we really understand how machines work at their level and second can we build useful things with it, can we use these tiny machines, once we understand how to make them in a robust setting, for instance, to make a new material, a new drug delivery system, or may be ultimately a nanorobot itself.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And nature is also giving you some of the answers, isn't it, because there are wonderful things like protein structure, for instance, DNA sequence, which acts as a sort of a dress system. So you can actually use the three-dimensional structures of these things, which are very predictable. There are very good computer programs to do that, to dress molecules to particular bits of three dimensional space. So we're sort of getting there aren't we, we've got a few ways of doing this.
Interviewee - Ben Feringa
Absolutely. There is a lot of lessons to be learnt from nature and of course DNA is a wonderful material in that respect because there's all this information stored in it and so many people around the world, including our own group, we use DNA to take advantage of the information that is in the molecule to built new molecules, you know, so called hybrid type of structures and where you take parts of nature and parts of synthetic materials and take the best of the two worlds.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Now, I know that this year is an important year for you, because it is actually 10 years since you did a beautiful piece of work. So I know about it, but for the people who don't just tell us what it was you did 10 years ago.
Interviewee - Ben Feringa
Now, what we did is we built as far as we can tell world's first nanoscale rotary motor. So we built a molecular system, which has kind of a propeller that can rotate in a unidirectional sense, say, either clockwise or counter-clockwise. The energy came from the light. So then we irradiate with a lamp source or with sunlight, the propeller starts to move and you have to realize this motor was the size of 1 nanometre, one billionth of a meter and as far as we can tell, this was the first unidirectional rotary motor that was made. Since then, we have enhanced the speed of this motor. Originally, it was about once a hour or so, that's a very slow motor, but since then we have been able to redesign this system, and now we can propel at the rate of several million times per second without compromising the motor function.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Ben Feringa with what could possibly be the next Christmas must have.
(14.15 - Carbonic acid captured)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
You are listening to Chemistry World with me, Chris Smith. And still to come, scientists break one of the strongest bonds, a new way to chemically interrogate works of art and a new desire boosting drug that promises to raise more than just an eyebrow, but before then have we significantly underestimated the power of carbonic acid, Matt.
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Indeed Chris. Scientists from Germany and Israel have discovered that carbonic acid is actually stronger than previously believed and how they've done this is by actually taking a very very quick snapshot of the molecule before it has chance to associate.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So talk us through the actual process of what we thought was going on with carbon dioxide, when it reacts with water to make carbonic acid and how this new discovery has changed our impression and perception of that.
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
When CO2 dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid and then it rapidly disassociates to the bicarbonate anion. This makes studying the strength of carbonic acid itself very very difficult because it can then go onto lose further proton. So what they did in this case was they put a bicarbonate salt in solution with the photo acid which is an acid that can be activated by shining light on them. They shone a femto-second laser at the solution and then a femto second later, they measured the infrared spectrum of the solution to see how long the molecule exists before it disappears.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And how does this inform our understanding of the behaviour of carbonic acid and what surprises were lurking in there?
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Well, it says it's a lot stronger than your chemistry text books at home will have in it, putting it somewhere between an acetic and formic acid, but what's crucial is that this process have absolute crucial importance to not just buffering the pH of blood, it also mediates the carbon cycle, so you've probably heard about the Copenhagen climate conference and CO2 is stored in massive amounts in the oceans and so when CO2 dissolves, if its actually is more acidic, the acidification of the oceans is going to be a lot more severe than previously thought.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Indeed, thank you Matt. Food for thought. That was Matt Wilkinson reporting on the work of Erik Nibbering, who is a scientist, based at Max Born Institute in Germany and that work he was describing has been published recently in the journal Science and you can also read the write-up on the Chemistry World web site at chemistryworld dot org.
(16.36 - Breaking the strongest bonds)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Now from strong acid to strong bond, but one which; Phil, scientists say they found a brand new way to break?
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Yes, absolutely Chris. We're talking about nitrogen and the nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond and also carbon monoxide and the carbon-oxygen triple bonds and these are two of the strongest bonds that we know in Chemistry and Paul Chirik and his group at Cornell University in the US have found a way to take both of those two molecules, mash up all the atoms again, break both of those two very strong bonds and make some really useful organic compounds.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Tell us how they're doing it?
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Okay, so it also revolves around a hafnium complex. So, this is a hafnium ion, sandwiched between two (UNCLEAR 17.16)rings, it is called a hafnocene. If you take a couple of these complexes, you can trap a dinitrogen molecule in between them. So it's bonding to two hafnium atoms that gives you essentially a nitrogen-nitrogen single bond now, because two of those bonds are bonding to hafnium, then you add carbon monoxide and normally you'd expect carbon monoxide to be very good link for metals, so you'd expect it to bond to metal but instead what these guys have seen, it inserts into that final nitrogen-nitrogen bond, breaks apart the two nitrogen atoms and you get a compound called oxamide, which is already itself used as a slow release fertilizer.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So is that where they are going with it, it's an easy way to make fertilizer, or would this be some kind of intermediate compound which is chemically active which we could then use to turn in to other things?
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Well, Oxamide itself can be converted into various other organo-nitrogen compounds and also if you would use different amounts of carbon monoxide you could break open the nitrogen bond in different ways to make different compounds which are again useful to make all sorts of different things.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And this process presumably, once you've got this reaction occurring and you've got the hafnium now linked to the new molecule it's not regenerating the surface, so that you can't just detach that molecule and make another molecule of Oxamide. You've unfortunately used up the surface at the moment.
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Yes, absolutely, I mean, at the moment it's not a catalytic process it's a stoichiometric process so you need as many hafnium atoms as you have nitrogen molecules, that's a fairly big disadvantage but you've got to stand somewhere and there's always a possibility of developing again into a catalytic process.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Still amazing to think that people have only discovered this chemical reaction, isn't it.
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Well yes, I mean, previously we've relied on the harbour process which has been around since the 19th century for combining nitrogen with hydrogen to make ammonia and then from ammonia make all sorts of organo-nitrogen compounds and fertilizers and whatever, but if we could take it down to sort of room temperature and not needing all of this high pressures that would be amazing.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Phillip Broadwith, if you owned what could possibly be a priceless relic.
(19.18 - Marco Leona on analytical techniques for studying works of art)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
It's unlikely you would want researchers chipping bits off of it to try to understand its origins or to confirm its authenticity. Thankfully newer techniques can do all of that though noninvasively.
Interviewee - Marco Leona
My name is Marco Leona and I am the scientist in charge of the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In our work which has to do with the study of works of art and cultural heritage in general, we try to answer the basic question of what is this, what is it made of and if the way we are looking at them now is exactly the way they were seen by people back when they were created.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And of course by definition if the works of art you've damaged them in the process.
Interviewee - Marco Leona
That is a very significant component, we really need to respect them in a very possible way, we cannot change any of their attributes, we must preserve them for people will come after us, both to enjoy them and study them.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And if you damage them, they'll come off to you for other reasons, but how do you propose to get around that problem of not physically damaging an object whilst at the same time interrogating it to find out its history.
Interviewee - Marco Leona
Well, for instance of general use in our field is x-ray fluorescent spectroscopy where you use x-ray beams to probe the elemental composition of an object by hitting an object with x-ray beams of a particular energy to stimulate the production of secondary x-ray beams which are given off by the object and the energies of these secondary x-ray beams is a measure of the composition, though without doing anything to the object really you can conduct elemental analysis in a completely non-invasive way.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And again if this is a fresco or something that's work of art in situ, it's not terribly easy or is it to deploy an x-ray machine in order to do that.
Interviewee - Marco Leona
A nice side if you want of all of the money that gets put into defence and anti-terrorism research is that techniques for first responders have been developed that are actually quite portable. So we have even battery powered spectrometers for this use, so we could go on a scaffold on an archaeological dig.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And what about Raman spectroscopy, this I have talked to a number of people who have looked paintings using this technique and they say that this is probably one of the gold standard techniques for interrogating old works.
Interviewee - Marco Leona
Raman spectroscopy is one of the greatest new tools that we have because we get information at the molecular level. We only get the information that titanium or lead in an object we know what atoms are bound to it, so that we get a sense of what kind of crystalline compound, what kind of mineral what kind of molecule is there. It is non-invasive because it works by shining laser on the object so as long as you have a good control over the energy level, you'll not burn the sample and it can be very specific.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So where x-rays were useful for seeing the big heavy stuff, the metal atoms and so on, Raman spectroscopy can tell you about everything including the metal but the other things that are there as well, so it's potentially giving you a whole new dimension I presume.
Interviewee - Marco Leona
Exactly, it's very useful not only for identifying materials presence, but for really studying the deterioration, understanding the form in which they are.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Are there any shortfalls with it though?
Interviewee - Marco Leona
Well one of the things that one of the problems with Raman spectroscopy is that the Raman effect is very weak, it works best for crystalline materials, it doesn't work that well for more loosely arranged structures, for instance the linseed oil films that keep paintings together, also it suffers from fluorescence when a substance is hit with laser light even things that we don't consider fluorescent will possibly emit a lot of broadband light that tends to obscure every detail in the Raman spectrum.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And how can you get around that?
Interviewee - Marco Leona
Well we've been working a lot on surface enhanced Raman scattering which is a particular effect that takes place when organic molecules are absorbed on the surface of metallic nanoparticles and nano structures. This is a complex phenomenon that has to do with the interaction between the molecules, electronic structure and the surface electron wave of the metallic nanoparticles.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Nonetheless you still have to add something to the surface aren't you, so is there a risk of changing the surface by doing it?
Interviewee - Marco Leona
Well unfortunately in this case we have to remove microscopic samples from the work so that we can do this type of analysis, the alternative though is using other techniques that would require samples at least a 100 times larger.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And can you give us any contemporary examples of problems or puzzles that you have solved or how you have unlocked understanding of what went only in the past using precisely this approach?
Interviewee - Marco Leona
Well, an interesting thing as soon as we develop a metal that allowed us to look at the very smallest sample, we are talking about 50 to 25 micron, so smaller than the diameter of a human hair, we were able to test a number of objects and we start looking at Medieval French Sculpture, we have a few very important pieces from the 12th century and pieces that had been thought to be from the same workshop based on stylistic reasons, we also found the same dye used on them. A dye that had to be imported from India. We have information from customs receipt that this dye called black dye was imported in Marseille, France in the late 13th Century and that is the earliest record of it in Europe. But in these two statues that come from near Marseille actually we find it a few decades earlier that so we have another link based on a workshop signature, the materials they were using, so these statues were both using the same dye which would have been rare, which would have been imported by Muslim traders from North Africa and the proximity to Marseille the port of arrival adds another elements to their origin in a joint workshop. It's also very interesting to see that there was this level of trade connecting Medieval France to India.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And these days we have replaced black dye with IT support and mass manufacturing. That was the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Scientist Marco Leona discussing how science is helping to unlock the history of ancient artefacts.
(Promo)
Brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry, this is the Chemistry World Podcast.
(End Promo)
(26.59 - Colour change test for arsenic)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
This is Chemistry World with me Chris Smith and in a moment from failed antidepressant to antidote to libido loss that's how some people are dubbing one side effect of the drug that could soon be hitting the market, but first Nina, arsenic.
Interviewee - Nina Notman
So there is really tiny amount of arsenic in all of our water but in parts of Bangladesh and India the levels can be well above the recommended levels. So once we know that arsenic is present in water, it is really easy to remove it but the current field tests looking for are really complex and quite slow, so this team led by Paresh Ray at Jackson State University in the US had been looking at a better way to work out whether we've got arsenic in our drinking water and they've developed a simple colour change method.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And how does it work?
Interviewee - Nina Notman
The method based on gold nano particles which are modified by attaching large organic ligand like the amino acid cysteine to the surface and the nano particles added to the water and the arsenic also binds to the ligand so if there is arsenic present it causes the nano particles to clump together so the more arsenic there is the more and the larger the clumps are and this affects the colour of the solution.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
It's been like a pregnancy test which works sort of similarly but a bit different, different outcome. Is this just a theoretical thing or is this actually being deployed in the field now.
Interviewee - Nina Notman
At the moment it's still being tested, so they've got a number of more vigorous tests to carry out before they can actually take out and sell it to people.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
But I also see a very major problem, because countries like you mentioned India, Bangladesh, they have lots and lots of arsenic coming out from salt water and from mining and things like that and this is a big problem. So something like this could presumably make a huge difference, as long as the people can get hold of the purification kits.
Interviewee - Nina Notman
Yeah, presumably, it really is, as you said a really major problem.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Thank you Nina.
(28.33 - A pharmaceutical named desire)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Right okay, well from arsenic in your drinking water to putting lead in your pencil, how about that. Matt, tell us about this.
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Well there's a new drug that could give a boost to the sex drive of women that are suffering from low libido, basically Boehringer Ingelheim develops an antidepressant drug called filbanserin and it failed quite spectacularly in clinical trials (UNCLEAR 28.50)it wasn't very efficacious, but one of the problems with these drugs is that often they actually reduce sex drive in women, so this is one of the common side effects that will be tested in clinical trials and those early clinical trials for the antidepressant indication actually showed that it boosted sex drive in some women. So now they have been developing it as a treatment for women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder which basically means that they have no desire to for sex.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
It's a real disorder though, because if these people are depressed and they are not going to feel like having sex anyway. So do you think it's just the side effect of depression and this really is a real manifestation?
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Well, there are many a claim of pharmaceutical companies developing diseases so they can sell drug into, but certainly some experts including Kathleen Segraves at Case Western Reserve University in the US believes that HSDD as it is known is a very real disorder and the potential of treatment for these women is very exciting and basically she states that the low desire is not related to depression and except for the relationship borne with their partner the women would be okay, if she never had sex at all. Apparently many women described the loss of desire, I want to want to have sex.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Do let us know how this agent works then, the fact that it is having the sexual side effect?
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Well, it works as a 5HT1A receptor agonist and 5HT2A receptor antagonist which are both serotonin receptors and it also acts as a partial agonist of the dopamine D4 receptor and all of these are receptors that play a part in depression, happiness and apparently also in sexual desire.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Why just women though, do we think that it's just a side effect of the fact that trial was only done in women in which this question was asked or was it involving both sexes in which just the women that reported this particular side effect.
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Well, I think that the results from these four-phase three trials is obviously that they've designed the trial as a potential treatment for women suffering from this problem and I don't think that there are many men suffering from that sort of problem. The problems that men have, have generally been solved by drugs such as Viagra and Cialis that work in a different way altogether and not usually involving a lack of desire.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And is this stuff on the market or is this just at the clinical trial stage and they're saying that they might take this further or have they not got approval for it?
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Well it's in between clinical trial stage and approval. They finished four pivotal phase-III clinical trials all of which seemed to have very positive results so at the moment I believe Boehringer Ingelheim are gathering the data together and preparing to submit the data to the Food and Drug Administration and the other regulatory authorities around the world to ask for approval for the drug.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
I suspect men everywhere will be pricking up their ears over that story. Thank you Matt.
(31.55 - The chemical conundrum: what chemical compound is used in car engine coolant systems and windscreen washing fluid to prevent it from freezing in cold weather?)
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Well, that's pretty much it for this month but before we go we have to catch up with the answer to the chemical conundrum from last time, so please Phil remind us of the question.
Interviewee - Phillip Broadwith
Well, last month we asked you what analytical technique was being used by scientists to prove or disprove the existence of water on the moon.
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
And the answer is infrared spectroscopy. Scientists have been using this to detect oxygen, hydrogen bonds in hydroxyl and water groups both present in the surface of the moon and gases formed when they have bombarded the moon with large chunks of rock.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So it's not to slam a massive rocket into the bottom end of the moon
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Indeed no Chris.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Well they did have some success, because they reckoned that there is something like one litre of water in about every 17 tons of moon rock, so it's relatively abundant, you could say. What do you want to know next month?
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Okay so with it being cold winter at the moment, we are going to ask, what chemical compound is used in car engine coolant systems and windscreen washing fluid to prevent it from freezing over the winter.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
I wish I had had some of that in my car over weekend, I could not wash my windscreen all the way down the motorway. I had to ride with a rather unkempt hairstyle with having my head out of the driver's window all the way down the motorway. What people have to do to enter and what are they going to win?.
Interviewee - Matt Wilkinson
Well they are going to win a goody bag including the RSC book, kitchen chemistry and a glow-in-the-dark RSC pen and all you have to do to enter is send your name and address to chemistryworld at rsc dot org.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And it would probably be a very good idea to include the answer too. Thank you Matt. Well that's it for this episode but do bear in mind before we return next month you can keep yourself amused and entertained, at least chemically speaking by tuning into our sister podcast Chemistry in Its Element where we take a look at the sinister side of the elements that make up the periodic table. Contributors this month were Matt Wilkinson, Phillip Broadwith and Nina Notman and I am Chris Smith from the nakedscientists.com. Happy New Year and until next time good bye.
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The Chemistry World podcast is brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry, look us up online at chemistryworld dot org.
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