I took another venture into chemical space to learn something new. One thing I recently learned about was about how they used to control attraction of the males. I was thinking this could be possible avenues into pest control or alternatives to pesticides in agriculture.
I was genuinely interested in what type of chemicals are being used by nature to attract if there was any patterns. I read the book “Insect Sex Pheromones” and in there was a countless stories of scientists debating on the structure and extraction methods of the chemicals from the bugs.
It was genuinely a very interesting read and the information in there was solid. I compiled a list of these molecules after reading some chapters.
and
It took awhile of manually mining the book but I started writing. After a little while a pattern started to emerge of these molecules and one molecule in particular showed up 4 times.
cis-9, trans-12-tetradecadien-1-ol acetate
The chemical diversity of these molecules tend to have these long alkyl chains with a couple of double bonds placed in key areas with an acetate group always placed at the end. I wondered if we can use these also as possible starting points for molecules that might be attractive to humans. However that market is vastly different.
One molecule that really stuck out to me was unique to some bug:
exo-7-ethyl-5-methyl-6,8-dioxabicylco[3.2.1] octane
This one was unique to only one or two insects which made it more distinguishable than the rest. One of my thoughts was that this prevented interspecies breeding which seemed to be more common than I thought when it came to insects.
Moving forward I want to add this into Global-Chem and perhaps we can analyze some pheromone databases to see how similar we select molecules as compared to nature.
Happy Cheminformatics!
