Cautionary tales on the use of proxies to estimate body size and form of extinct animals.

Body size is of fundamental importance to our understanding of extinct organisms. Physiology, ecology and life history are all strongly influenced by body size and shape, which ultimately determine how a species interacts with its environment. Reconstruction of body size and form in extinct animals provides insight into the dynamics underlying community composition and faunal turnover in past ecosystems and broad macroevolutionary trends.

Ten-Gram-Scale Total Synthesis of the Anticancer Drug Candidate E7130 to Supply Clinical Trials.

E7130 is a novel drug candidate with an exceedingly complex chemical structure of the halichondrin class, discovered by a total synthesis approach through joint research between the Kishi group at Harvard University and Eisai. Only 18 months after completion of the initial milligram-scale synthesis, ten-gram-scale synthesis of E7130 was achieved, providing the first good manufacturing practice (GMP) batch to supply clinical trials. This paper highlights the challenges in developing ten-gram-scale synthesis from the milligram-scale synthesis.

A new cochliodont anterior tooth plate from the Mississippian of Alabama (USA) having implications for the origin of tooth plates from tooth files.

Background: Paleozoic holocephalian tooth plates are rarely found articulated in their original positions. When they are found isolated, it is difficult to associate the small, anterior tooth plates with the larger, more posterior ones. Tooth plates are presumed to have evolved from fusion of tooth files.

Computerized estimation of patient setup errors in portal images based on localized pelvic templates for prostate cancer radiotherapy.

We have developed a computerized method for estimating patient setup errors in portal images based on localized pelvic templates for prostate cancer radiotherapy. The patient setup errors were estimated based on a template-matching technique that compared the portal image and a localized pelvic template image with a clinical target volume produced from a digitally reconstructed radiography (DRR) image of each patient. We evaluated the proposed method by calculating the residual error between the patient setup error obtained by the proposed method and the gold standard setup error determined by consensus between two radiation oncologists.

Catalytic asymmetric synthesis of chiral tertiary organoboronic esters through conjugate boration of beta-substituted cyclic enones.

The first catalytic enantioselective conjugate boration of beta-substituted cyclic enones was developed to produce enantiomerically enriched tertiary organoboronates. The optimized asymmetric catalyst includes a QuinoxP*-CuO(t)Bu complex generated from CuPF(6)(CH(3)CN)(4) and LiO(t)Bu. In situ generated LiPF(6) significantly increased product yield.