Nature Open Access and the nature of research

This past week, the Nature Publishing Group which publishes the very prestigious Nature journal announced that 49 titles (including Nature) will be free to read. In the sciences, reading journal articles is the bread and butter of keeping up with cutting-edge research. Costs of these journal subscriptions, however, have skyrocketed over the past decade. This has led to the growth of different "open access" options, some more complicated than the others. The libraries of smaller colleges in particular have had to cut back on their access to journals simply because continuing to pay for the subscriptions was unsustainable. This makes it more difficult for both students and faculty to quickly find what they need. Inter Library Loan (ILL) is what I use if my university's library does not have access to the article I am looking for. At the moment, I am not paying for the ILL service and libraries foot the bill. Therefore I try to be judicious in deciding whether I really need to read the article to help keep costs down.

The internet was buzzing when this announcement came out on Dec 2. Since open access means different things to different people, there was plenty of interpretation (and misinterpretation) of what this move meant. Interestingly, three days later the announcement had to be amended so as to clarify the limits of what all this actually meant. The bottom of the article reads: "Corrected: The original headline on this article gave an exaggerated impression of the way in which content from Nature journals can now be accessed. As the story makes clear, read-only sharing must be facilitated by a subscriber."

The week before this announcement, as part of my reading more widely developments in my field of chemistry, I came across an interesting article in Nature Communications (which became "fully" open access on Oct 20). The article, titled "Emergence of single-molecule chirality from achiral reactants", is interesting because it could shed light on the origin of handedness in the molecules of life. What is this handedness?

 

(Image taken from phys.org)

Because we live in three-dimensional space, it turns out that any molecule possessing a carbon atom connected to four different chemical groups has a chiral center. The picture above shows the general picture of a standard amino acid (alpha amino acid, if you want to be technical). The two molecules shown are mirror images of one another but non-superimposable, just like your hands. They are chemically identical in every way unless they interact with other chiral molecules. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Living organisms only use the left-handed version in proteins. This is puzzling because it is unclear at life's origin why only the left-handed versions are used.

In his most famous experiment that kicked off the whole field of origin-of-life research (published in Nature's rival famous journal Science in 1953), Stanley Miller had mixed very simple chemicals you might find on the primordial earth (methane, ammonia, water, hydrogen gas). A source of energy was provided through an electric spark to kick off the reaction. A week later amino acids were found in the mixture! Now here's the important part: The amino acids were made in equal amounts of the right and left handed version. In fact any chemical reaction starting from purely non-chiral molecules that could potentially lead to chiral molecules will produce the left and right handed in equal amounts, or what is known as a racemic mixture.

So how do you get to homochirality (or one-handedness) in the molecules of life? It turns out that there are physical mechanisms that can convert a racemic mixture into one that has "more of one-handedness than the other". One way to do this is by a process called Viedma ripening that makes use of interconverting molecules between the solid and solution phases. (When you are dissolving a salt in water, you are converting the chemical species from the solid phase into the solution phase.) I'm not going to describe the process here but suffice to say that the authors of the paper combined a chemical reaction involving non-chiral reactants that produced a chiral molecule (in a racemic mixture) and then combined this with Viedma ripening to achieve "homochirality" where the solid phase had just one of the chiral molecules but not the other.

This is still a long way from solving the puzzle of the origin of homochirality in life, but it is a clever idea that made use of a process first "discovered" in physics and combined it with chemistry. "Interdisciplinary" is now the buzzword in research. But how do we learn about what is going on in other areas? This is why as a scientist I try to read more broadly and not confine myself to my very specific subfield. Reading the Nature Communications article this week illustrated in a small way what I do as a scientist. As I was reading the article I was chasing down some of the references in it to catch up on the latest known about Viedma ripening. I skimmed through several other articles (in both physics and chemistry journals) and learned not just details about the mechanics of the process, but about some mathematical modeling and computer simulations that could pertain to my own research. The specific chemical reaction used (a Mannich reaction) gave me an idea in one of my own research projects that I should try out. Therefore I did a little more reading surrounding the topic and sketched something I will try out (or give to one of my students as a project). So fifteen minutes of reading a specific article turned out into three hours of research where I learned a number of useful things and came up with a new research idea. That's how the rabbit hole of research goes!