ITT: Bizarre moments of symmetry in chemistry/biology/whatever

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>>8912736
Not bizzare but always found β-Lactam to be quite satisfying

>>8914571
Bless you for replying to my day old thread, but what about it satisfies you?

Look up bromantane or memantine. Cool stuff!

>>8914586
That is really cool, I went further into looking at other polyhedral chemistry, and it's all incredibly bizarre compared to typical organic stuff. Adamantane in specific is aesthetic as fuck.

Who doesn't like the benzene ring?

>>8914574
Probably the fact it even exists. Its geometry makes resonance with nitrogen lone pair impossible and so it becomes more reactive. Not to mention tension created by rhe cyclic ring.

>>8912736
Isn't nicotine pretty similar to adenine and guanine?

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>>8914999
not very. caffeine is much more similar to adenine and guanine

>>8915430
Chem buff, but still fairly noob-ish when it comes to biology, what's the metabolic pathway for caffeine? I know for a lot of plants the secondary metabolytes, like caffeine, are defense mechanisms that mostly cause their insect enemies to die or go crazy, but I wonder with caffeine how exactly it's metabolized.

I mean, some secondary metabolytes mimic amino acids, so synthesized proteins with the fake AAs are broken and worthless, could it be something similar with mimicking a nucleic acid?

>>8915536

This is a good question. Why does some amino acid lookalikes have the capacity to cause DNA damage through mistaken basepair incorporation and failed repair... and yet other lookalikes are totally benign?

Not sure if this counts but the generalised stokes theorem is breathtaking.

>>8915541
probably electron interaction differences

>>8915569

Electrons don't exist. They are a Jewish lie.

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everything in crystallography

>>8915569
the fat methyl group in the middle of the caffeine ketones is too big to do any dna pairing, and the bottom ketone wont let it fit in place of a guanine, the top ketone wont let it fit in place of an adenine.

caffeine specifically fits to an adenosine receptor without activating it and blocks adenosine from starting its signal cascade (ie signalling tiredness)

>>8915623
Thanks, that answers it. Secondary question though, does it have more of a positive or negative effect on the herbivores that predate on plants that secrete caffeine?

On one hand, I can see how blocking that pathway will lower fitness through exhaustion without realizing it, so an aversion to caffeine would be selected for, but on the other, there could be a bizarre effect where because it's in the beans, predators would favor caffeine, and potentially carry the seeds with them, like how fruit works sometimes.

Has it been documented, at least, which one is the more likely case? It's cool if you don't know, you definitely helped with the other answer.

>>8915430
makes sense considering it works by being an antagonist to Adenosine

I wonder if it could have antagonistic effects on guanosine

every drug is about the size of a bisphenyl since thats what fits into your receptors

>>8912736
>see crystallography/mineralogy

The role "handedness" plays in organic chemistry, and pondering how/why it came to be the way it is. Satisfying, but also perplexing.

>>8916649
>handedness
Are Greek words too hard for you?

>>8916685
Needless synonyms are needless.

>>8912736
Motherfucking endosymbiotic theory.
It's like if you took a blender and stuffed it into a car and suddenly the car can go faster.

>>8916719
Endosymbiosis is pretty incredible honestly

>>8914586
>google memantine
>treats dementia related to alzheimers
How the fuck does an amine attached to a tiny diamond help with alzheimers wtf

>>8916685
Probably not a native english speaker and google translate gave him that

>>8915571
Go away weev

>>8916828
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris_Parsons3/publication/226981247_Neuroprotective_and_symptomatological_action_of_memantine_relevant_for_Alzheimer%27s_disease_-_A_unified_glutamatergic_hypothesis_on_the_mechanism_of_action/links/0046351750e5e73eb1000000/Neuroprotective-and-symptomatological-action-of-memantine-relevant-for-Alzheimers-disease-A-unified-glutamatergic-hypothesis-on-the-mechanism-of-action.pdf
It's a channel blocker.

Anyone else here think it's cool how Benzene's ring structure appears everywhere?

>>8915541
Shape really, if the enzymes that build DNA can't fit around them then they're completely harmless.

>>8916924
Pretty insane how such simple molecules can do specific things in the brain. Like lithium treating bipolar disorder

>>8916928
Yeah, the amount of interactions in your body is absolutely beyond imagining.

>>8916925
eh, the ring loses its zing for me when it's got got who knows what groups hanging off it.

>>8912736
Nickel affinity chromatography for protein purification. It's just such an elegant, effective process, whenever I do it in lab I swear I become autistic for the hour.

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Gene expression patterns are the shit.

>>8916925
>>8916988

Benzene derivatives don't seem very special, because of how stable benzene is it just feels like a natural conclusion.

Benzene itself is kind of amazing though, in terms of thinking about its entropic character. The bond angles in a 6 membered ring are all near-perfect in terms of the bond angles in a tetrahedral structure assuming roughly equivalent bond polarities, and on top of that the pi system conjugation in aromatics makes it a real damn powerhouse at tanking momentary dipoles.

That all making it planar makes it also suuuper easy to design a synthesis while keeping in mind the three dimensionality of the structure. So benzene is pretty cool I think.

>>8915547
I was hoping there'd be more math in this thread, too. I'm just a lowly engineering student so the generalized version doesn't mean much more to me than the form I'm familiar with, so I can't speak to that. I did just find out about Noether's theorem the other day, and when I tried that one on some dynamical systems I had to go take a walk afterwards.

All these chem people surprised that rings look like other rings...

>>8919603
>>8919603
>Chem/biochem thread
>Surprised people are talking about chemical structures
Engineers really are faggots.

>>8919619
Yeah, people can be just as fascinated by interesting mathematical patterns as natural patterns dictated by forces, though.

Ultimately, chemistry is just a form of an extension of physics, and the rules that can be mathematically expressed that govern physical properties (most importantly in terms of chem/biochem, electromagnetic forces) are just as valid as targets for fetishistic aesthetic indulgences.

Though engineers usually don't dabble in the sort of descriptive means of analyzing the universe, they mostly stick to "hurr how can we make people's lives better through mechanistic production of goods or tools?", which is incredibly divorced from the same kind of purely fascination-driven pursuit of natural science, so yeah fuck them, the faggots.

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>>8919619
Wow, you really got me.

This here is, apparently, glycylglycine electron density. It's not, I'm afraid, symmetric, but nonetheless immensely satisfying to know that that was generated experimentally.

>>8915536
>similar with mimicking a nucleic acid

Not in the same sense as non-canonical amino acids ruining proteins, otherwise it'd be causing some wild cancers in a similar manner to intercalating agents. Caffeine is a methylxanthine that activates adenosine receptors and basically starts a signal cascade that up-regulates energy use. So it does mimic a nucleotide, but only as a signalling molecule

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>>8912736
>c20

That's cheating, draw it rite

>>8920692
It's not really cheating if you consider that the only purpose for it is an 'anchor'. It has no functional
chemical purpose, it's just synthesized with the carbon tail so it has better linkage with others.

It's like how hemoglobin is a big ol' protein, but its active site is that molecule.

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>>8920703
>t has no functional
>chemical purpose,
wrong again friendo
"Different side chains characterize each type of chlorophyll molecule, and alters the absorption spectrum of light."

>>8920720
but the side chains I thought just had to do with alcohol group difference/placement.

If it does have to do with the carbon tail and conjugation in that sense, then that is definitely cool, thanks for informing me.

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>>8912736
High resolution scanning electron microscopy is always breathtaking.

the pyramids look just like standard distribution its probably not aliens but its too much of a coinsidence

This is a great thread

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I love that proteins can be crystallized
That they can be used to diffract X-rays to determine their structure is icing on the cake

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_convergent_evolution

>Swim bladders: Buoyant bladders independently evolved in fishes, the tuberculate pelagic octopus, and siphonophores such as the Portuguese man o' war.

>in the evolution of sexual reproduction and origin of the sex chromosome: Mammals, females have two copies of the X chromosome (XX) and males have one copy of the X and one copy of the Y chromosome (XY). In birds it is the opposite, with males have two copies of the Z chromosome (ZZ) and females have one copy of the Z and one copy of the W chromosome (ZW).

>Biomineralization the secrete protective shells or carapaces made out of organically made hard materials like mineral carbonates and organic chitins came about in unrelated species all at the same time during the cambrian Explosion in: mollusks, brachiopods, arthropods, bryozoans, echinoderms, tube worms.

>Lichens are a partnerships of fungi and algae. Each "species" of lichen is make of different fungi and algae species, thus each has to come about independently.

(Pic related)
>Venus flytrap sea anemone is a Animalia and Venus flytrap plant. Both look and act the same.[226]

fun

>>8920886
Falling down the bioinformatics rabbit hole has made me hate convergent evolution