EAS Awards

The winners of the 2000 Eastern Analytical Symposium (EAS) Awards will be presented during the meeting from 29 October to 3 November in Atlantic City, NJ, USA. We are delighted to report that amongst the winners is Spectroscopy Europe columnist Tony (A.M.C.) Davies, who is honoured for his achievements in NIR spectroscopy. Well done Tony!

Amongst the other winners are Svante Wold of Umea University, Sweden, who receives the Galactic Industries Award for Achievements in Chemometrics; Hans W. Spiess of the Max-Planck Institut für Polymerforschung, Germany; James Robinson of Louisiana State University, USA, who has won the New York Section of the Society for Applied Spectroscopy Gold Medal Award; and Isiah M. Warner, also of Louisiana State University, who is the recipient of the EAS Award for Outsanding Achievements in the Fields of Analytical Chemistry.

More informaton can be found on the EAS web site: www.eas.org/.

Thompson Award

Elsevier Science, publisher of Spectrochimica Acta Part A, makes an annual award in memory of Sir Harold Thompson, who was editor of the journal for over 20 years. All papers published in the molecular spectroscopy section of the journal are automatically considered for the award, which consists of $1000 together with a presentation certificate.

The winning paper in 1999 was “Attenuated total internal reflection spectroscopy with an intracavity laser absorption spectrometer”, by A. Charvat, S.A. Kovalencko and B. Abel, Spectrochim. Acta A 55, 1553 (1999). www.elsevier.nl/locate/saa.

New moleculae in space

Results from the European Space Agency’s infrared space telescope on ISO have shown the presence of a new molecule in the clouds of gas and dust in the space between the stars. The newly-detected molecule is the methyl radical CH₃, the existence of which in the gas in space had been predicted by Nobel winner Gerhard Herzberg, who died last year. ISO has already made the first detections in space of at least ten new molecules.

The methyl radical was detected by the short wavelength spectrometer (SWS) on board the satellite. The detected abundance of CH₃ is much higher than predicted by the traditional models describing molecular clouds. This implies that the models will have to be reviewed.

Detection of CH3 by the short wavelength spectrometer of ISO.

“The unexpected amount of CH₃ is a very important aspect. None of the models predict so much CH₃. This comes indeed as a surprise, since these models reproduce very well the abundance of many other molecules. So, what is wrong? Are we missing some important aspect of the chemistry?”, says Helmut Feuchtgruber, from the Max-Planck Institut für Extraterrestrische Physik and lead author of the discovery. Feuchtgruber underlines also “how thrilled Herzberg would have been with this detection”.

This first detection of the free radical CH₃ in the interstellar space is reported in: H. Feuchtgruber, F.P. Helmich, E.F. van Dishoeck and C.M. Wright, Astrophys. J. 535, L111 (2000). The paper is based on data from both spectrometers on board ISO, the Short Wavelength Spectrometer and the Long Wavelength Spectrometer, LWS.

NMR helps unlock BSE

The spatial molecular structure of the bovine prion protein has been decoded at the ETH Zurich using NMR spectroscopy. The healthy prion proteins of humans and bovine cattle are very similar. It therefore appears that transmission of Mad Cow Disease (BSE) to humans might be rationalised on the level of the molecular structure. This is reported by a research team from the Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics of the ETH Zurich in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). In this work the spatial structure of the bovine prion protein in its normal, healthy form, has been described for the first time. Differences between the proteins of man and cow are shown only in the distribution of the electrostatic surface charge, but not in the spatial folding of the protein.

Up to the end of 1999 about 50 persons, mainly in Great Britain, had died of the so-called new variant form of Creuzfeldt–Jakob disease (nvCJD). Scientists believe that this disease could be caused by the consumption of certain meat products from cattle with BSE.

The prion protein is involved in the development of both mad cow disease in cattle and nvCJD in humans. This protein occurs naturally in mammals; it can, however, be transformed into a pathogenic variant that can be precipitated in clumped form in the brain. In order to be able to understand how mad cow disease or nvCJD develop, it is essential to have profound knowledge of the prion proteins. Since present information on prion diseases is based largely on animal experiments with mice and hamsters, the prion proteins of these two laboratory species are also of great interest.

Research teams from the Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics of the ETH Zurich, under the direction of Professors Kurt Wüthrich and Rudolf Glockshuber, have been able to describe the three-dimensional molecular structure of the whole prion protein of mouse and man. The structure of the prion protein of the hamster has also recently been described in the USA. Dr. Francisco López García, Dr Ralph Zahn, Dr Roland Riek and Professor Kurt Wüthrich have now decoded the structure of the prion protein of bovine cattle by means of NMR spectroscopy.

Comparison of the four prion proteins shows that they display very similar three-dimensional folds of the polypeptide chain. The three-dimensional folds of the prion proteins of bovine cattle and humans are in fact practically identical. There are, however, clearly definable local differences in the structures of the prion proteins of the mouse and the hamster on the one hand and those of the cow on the other.

Figure 1. The structure of the bovine prion protein by NMR. In the globular region, which consists of 110 amino acids, the a-helices are green, the b-sheet is blue and the other parts are yellow. The white mobile tail, consisting of 107 amino acids, is represented by the superposition of 20 out of a large number of images.

Prion proteins are made up of a freely-mobile tail and a globular, highly structured region containing three spiral segments (a-helices) and a b-sheet (Figure 1). The new publication now shows that the globular region has practically identical folds in the prion proteins of cow and man while the proteins of the mouse and the hamster show local structural differences relative to the bovine prion protein (Figure 2). These concern in particular regions of the molecule that have previously been implicated to play an important role in the development of prion diseases. Differences between the prion proteins of humans and bovine cattle occur in the electrostatic surface charge distribution of the globular region (Figure 3). According to the Zurich team, an influence of the molecular structure of the healthy prion protein on a barrier to the transmission of prion diseases between cow and man could therefore be rationalised by this difference in the surface charge.

Figure 2. Comparison of the spatial structure of different prion proteins. The prion proteins of the different species are superimposed in pairs.

Figure 3. Distribution of the electrostatic surface charge in the prion proteins of cow and man. Red: negative charge; blue: positive charge; white: neutral charge. The white arrow identifies a region in which the human prion protein differs from the other prion proteins by the presence of a negative charge. The yellow arrow identifies a region in which only the bovine prion protein shows a negative charge.

In the long term, this work could lead to new possibilities for influencing and possibly preventing the transmission of prion-dependent diseases between different mammalian species.

EU research web site

The CORDIS French Council Presidency Research and Technology Information service is on the web at www.cordis.lu/france. The service is available in French and English and is updated daily, covering the key research and technology activities throughout the six-month duration of the French Council Presidency. Sections include a diary of events and conferences, a window on French research, and information on EU research and innovation.