Practical Fragments

Although 2020 and 2021 were baleful exceptions, tuberculosis is normally the world’s deadliest infectious disease. The pathogen Mycobacteriu...

Back in 2020 we described fragment-derived inhibitors of the highly conserved bacterial enzyme LpxC, which is essential for biosynthesis of...

Most of the fragment events we’ve highlighted are in the US, Europe, and Australia, but that does not fully reflect where all the good scie...

The winter solstice is behind us in the Northern Hemisphere, which means 2022 is rapidly drawing to a close. As we have done for the past d...

Gram negative bacteria such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa are a continuing threat, and antibacterial drug discovery is not keeping pace . The e...

The state of antibiotic drug discovery is – to put it mildly – dangerously poor. Not only do you have all the challenges inherent to drug d...

This is the straight-to-the-point title of a new book published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, edited by Steven Howard ( Astex ) and C...

The quest for new antibacterial agents can seem quixotic: no sooner have you found a killer molecule than the bugs have developed resistanc...

Practical Fragments has tried to publicize the dangers of pan-assay interference compounds , or PAINS . These compounds show up as nuis...

What does this protein do? Now that any genome can be sequenced, this question gets raised quite often. In many cases it is possible to giv...

Last year we highlighted a paper from Chris Abell and colleagues at the University of Cambridge in which they applied FBLD to CYP121, a po...

The cytochrome P450 enzymes, or CYPs, are a huge class of oxidizing enzymes found across all kingdoms of life. In humans these enzymes metab...

I recently returned from Philadelphia, where the American Chemical Society held its 244 th national fall meeting. As always this was a ma...

Back in October of last year we highlighted a paper in Science that disclosed a new antibiotic targeting the bacterial protein FtsZ. The ...