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Background: Synaesthesia is a neurological condition which manifests clinically as an involuntary experience of a sensory or cognitive pathway upon stimulation of a second unrelated sensory or cognitive pathway, Case Presentation: We report a 55 year old male who presented with a life-long history of grapheme-colour synaesthesia in which the triggering grapheme was the double letter 'll' (a geminate consonant), but not 'l' as a single letter. This patient's synaesthesia was also font specific (becoming more evident with serif fonts) and influenced by migraine headache (being suppressed during the prodrome and aura of a migraine headache), Conclusion: These results suggest that geminate consonants are uniquely processed rather than treated as two individual consonants. Also, the existence of a mechanistic relationship between synesthetic and migrainous events sequence was verified.

To generate the first series of prodigiosene conjugates, the tripyrrolic skeleton was appended to estrone, tamoxifen and porphyrin frameworks by way of ester linkers and various hydrocarbon chain lengths. The ability of the conjugates to inhibit various types of cancer cells was evaluated in vitro. The porphyrin conjugates did not exhibit significant activity. The estrone conjugates exhibited modest activity, for the most part. However, significantly greater growth inhibition activity against certain breast, colon, lung, leukemia, melanoma and prostate cell lines was noted. This unusual effect for this first generation model class of compound warrants further investigation and comparison to cases where estrogens are linked to prodigiosenes via connection points that do not feature in estrogen receptor binding. The 4-hydroxytamoxifen conjugates exhibit nanomolar range activity against the MCF-7 breast cancer cell line, paving the way to expand the scope and connectivity of prodigiosene-tamoxifen conjugates., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)