UPDATE: I feel as though I should add a bit of an update to this. These are very preliminary opinions. It may be somewhat unfair of me to even have posted them, but they’re what first came to mind. As I think more about what La Clair said, the more it makes a bit of sense, but it’s still nothing that’s hitting me as great. Take my opinions or leave them, you won’t hurt my feelings any.

Jesus, that was a whirlwind lecture. J.J. went at fifty brazillion miles an hour and presented more images of glowing gels then an organic chemist should EVER SEE in his or her lifetime. I don’t even know where to begin. If I’m not mistaken, he started off with something along the lines of ‘you make enormous molecules synthetically and then put a label on them and that’s dumb when you can just use natural products.’ He then shows these enormous natural products that glow and says you can append them to proteins and they can travel into the cell and stain different components. At least I think that’s what he said – he said it so quickly and his PowerPoint slides moved so fast it wasn’t trivial for me to follow along.

Of course, he passed over the controversial hexacyclinol in the beginning, suggesting some people don’t believe him and that he is currently remaking it to prove us all wrong – stuff we all already know. And if you’re curious, there was no clashing with Rychnovsky’s student at all. Her talk was in no way related to hexacyclinol.

I think the biggest problem with his idea is that, not only is it done, but it’s done ridiculously inexpensively with commercially available things. Cell trackers are available from a very large number of companies and you can buy them which selectively stain the ER, the nucleus, the cell membrane, the ribosome membrane, etc. etc. So, even if there was a point, I missed it. That could also have been my bad as well… I had to pee the entire time. There was time for one question at the end of his talk but no one bothered. I wanted to state the above, but the room was PACKED and HOT. There wasn’t even enough room to move around. The doors were jammed with people. It was crazy. His last slide had an image of that t-shirt with ‘the proof is in the product.’ At least he has a sense of humor. When it was all over, the moderator got up at then end and, clearly confused, said something like “I know I’m supposed to ask a question here, but I’m just as much at a loss as you guys.” And with that, a mass exodus took place out of the room.

Update II La Clair had an interesting point with a peptide based macrocycle that would ring open and move from one organelle to another. I dunno if I’ve read anything that does that before.

iwishshewerereal.JPGUpdate III There is a second take on it at Totally Synthetic right now.

Update La Fin: (that’s French) There is a third take on it at Tenderbutton right now. Also, Dr. La Clair has graced us with his presence to answer questions via the internets for those of us that were too chicken shit (or baffled) to do it in the meeting. Please see the comments. (are there any accents on any letters of “La Fin”? My French is, how you say, total crap.)