Welcome
You have found the Cook Group home page in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at North Dakota State University.
The Cook Research Group has three main areas of focus:
1) the development of environmentally friendly synthetic methodology to enable asymmetric synthesis;
2) the total synthesis of molecules with potential benefits to the human race as new materials and/or have important biological function;
and
3) the discovery of new small molecules that impact human medicine.
In our efforts toward those major goals we have developed new asymmetric allylation methods for the selective generation of chiral amines utilizing environmentally benign indium and bismuth catalysts. We are showcasing our new methods by carrying out the total synthesis of structurally interesting natural products. And we are targeting cancer, heart disease and other autoimmune diseases through the development of novel inhibitors and activators for histone deacetylases. These enzymes are responsible for epigenetic regulation of tumor suppressors and other genes.
Latest Paper from the Cook Group
Histone deacetylase activators: N-acetylthioureas serve as highly potent and isozyme selective activators for human histone deacetylase-8 on a fluorescent substrate
We report, for the first time, that certain N-acetylthiourea derivatives serve as highly potent and isozyme selective activators for the recombinant form of human histone deacetylase-8 in the assay system containing Fluor-de-Lys as a fluorescent substrate. The experimental data reveals that such activating feature is manifested via decrease in the Km value of the enzyme’s… Read More