Celia Arnaud

Obituaries By Alexandra A. Taylor Ross Davis Compton, 86, died March 2, 2021, in San Marcos, Texas. “He taught chemistry at Texas State University from 1966 to 2019. Besides teaching, he loved to travel; our family visited 47 states in America, Canada, Mexico, and many European countries.

Inhibitor in the active site of p90 RSK2 forms a covalent bond with cysteine 436 but not nearby cysteine 560. hydrogen bonds with threonine 493 stabilize the complex and add specificity. Reversibly targeting noncatalytic cysteine residues could lead to covalent drug molecules with improved potency and selectivity but with less potential for off-target adducts, Jack Taunton of the University of California, San Francisco, and coworkers report ( Nat. Chem. Biol., DOI: 10.1038/nchembio.925).

When it comes to high-resolution mass spectrometry, Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance used to be the only game in town. FTICR MS still has the highest resolving power of all MS techniques, but improvements in other mass analyzers have made them suitable for some applications that previously required the big guns of FTICR. High resolution is particularly important as a means to obtain high mass accuracy and exact-as opposed to nominal-mass measurements.