As you probably guessed, several editors will be attending the spring ACS meeting next week – you might remember that we created special conference websites for the spring and fall ACS meetings last year. This year there’s been a major overhaul to our Chemistry Portal – in addition to the list of recent content from Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Protocols, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, and news@nature.com, there’s a new section entitled “”http://www.nature.com/chemistry/looking_back/index.html">Looking Back."

The “”http://www.nature.com/chemistry/looking_back/index.html">Looking Back" page contains a list of Nature chemistry papers that ‘caught our eye’ for one reason or another and were published between 1950 and 2000 – there are a few ‘classic’ Nature papers (for example, Watson & Crick’s Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid and Kroto et al.‘s C60: Buckminsterfullerene) and a few you might recognize from courses you took in college or graduate school (for example, Jones et al.’s paper Stereochemistry of phosphoryl group transfer using a chiral [16O, 17O, 18O] stereochemical course of alkaline phosphatase and Nicolaou et al.‘s Total synthesis of taxol). There’s even a 1950 paper from RB Woodward (Structure of chlorodesoxypatulinic acid) and a 1969 paper from EJ Corey (Biological activity of synthetic prostaglandins)… Have a favorite? Think we missed a key paper? Please let us know…

As Katharine mentioned yesterday, we’ve also put together a special issue of Nature – the issue is packed full of chemistry, so if you’re at the meeting, swing by the NPG booth and pick up a free copy…

There’s a News & Views Q&A on C-H activation from Bob Bergman, a review article from David Gorin & Dean Toste on relativistic effects in homogeneous gold catalysis, a Careers and Recruitment piece in our Naturejobs section, and several primary research papers:

Total synthesis of marine natural products without using protecting groups by Phil Baran et al. (click here to read the N&V)

Biasing reaction pathways with mechanical force by Charles Hickenboth et al. (click here to read the N&V)

BluB cannibalizes flavin to form the lower ligand of vitamin B12 from Michiko Taga et al. (click here to read the N&V)

We’ll be adding blog entries throughout the conference, so please check back frequently to see what we’re writing about…

See you at the meeting!

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)