A team of chemists at Nankai University has developed a two-step approach to converting aliphatic amines into unnatural amino acids. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group ...

Short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) are aliphatic carboxylic acids with fewer than six carbon atoms, chiefly acetate, propionate and butyrate, generated by gut microbial fermentation of dietary fibre.

Aliphatic acids—hydrocarbon chains with a carboxylic acid on one end—are everywhere. But unfortunately, they’re not much use to synthetic chemists. The saturated chain has only two carbon atoms that ...