...Click chemistry revolutionized the options available to chemists for creating the molecules they desired. Bioorthogonal chemistry made it possible to monitor the chemical processes going on inside living cells without harming them...
...“It’s all about snapping molecules together,” said Johan Åqvist, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, during the announcement. Imagine, he told the audience, that you could attach small chemical buckles to a bunch of different types of molecular building blocks and then link these buckles together to produce complex molecules. That idea, put forth by
Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute about 20 years ago, later became reality when he and
Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen independently found the first perfect candidates for the job. Their buckles easily snapped together and wouldn’t link onto anything they shouldn’t...
...Then, in 2003,
Carolyn Bertozzi proposed that click chemistry could be used in studies of biological systems to make it easier to observe vital cellular processes without interfering with them. Bertozzi called this “bioorthogonal” chemistry in
a paper she and her colleagues published that year...
....The ability to perform complex reactions in living systems without interfering with natural biological reactions made it possible to study molecules and cellular processes in cells and
inside complex organisms such as zebra fish, rather than in laboratory dishes. It has already helped scientists understand an important protein processing reaction called glycosylation, helped to develop molecular imaging molecules that could detect disease in living organisms, and opened up the possibility of selectively delivering drugs to
particular tissues in the body...
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