Chemical biology

The discipline involves the application of chemical techniques, analysis, and often small molecules produced through synthetic chemistry, to the study and manipulation of biological systems.[7][8] Wöhler's work is often considered to be instrumental in the development of organic chemistry and natural product synthesis, both of which play a large part in modern chemical biology.[9] Friedrich Miescher's work during the late 19th century investigating the cellular contents of human leukocytes led to the discovery of 'nuclein', which would later be renamed DNA.Fredrick Sanger Thomas A. Steitz Ada E. Yonath Brian K. Kobilka George P. Smith Gregory P. Winter Jennifer A. Doudna Morten Meldal Glycobiology is the study of the structure and function of carbohydrates.Carolyn Bertozzi's research group has developed methods for site-specifically reacting molecules at the surface of cells via synthetic sugars.[28] Similarly, these principles can be used in areas of agriculture and food research, specifically in the syntheses of unnatural products and in generating novel enzyme inhibitors.[31] Although strictly biological techniques have been developed to achieve these ends, the chemical synthesis of peptides often has a lower technical and practical barrier to obtaining small amounts of the desired protein.[41] Identification of enzyme substrates is a problem of significant difficulty in proteomics and is vital to the understanding of signal transduction pathways in cells.A method that has been developed uses "analog-sensitive" kinases to label substrates using an unnatural ATP analog, facilitating visualization and identification through a unique handle.[54] Thus, chemists have recently developed a panel of bioorthogonal chemistry that proceed chemospecifically, despite the milieu of distracting reactive materials in vivo.Unfortunately, the most famous "click reaction," a [3+2] cycloaddition between an azide and an acyclic alkyne, is copper-catalyzed, posing a serious problem for use in vivo due to copper's toxicity.The advances in modern sequencing technologies in the late 1990s allowed scientists to investigate DNA of communities of organisms in their natural environments ("eDNA"), without culturing individual species in the lab.This metagenomic approach enabled scientists to study a wide selection of organisms that were previously not characterized due in part to an incompetent growth condition.Sources of eDNA include soils, ocean, subsurface, hot springs, hydrothermal vents, polar ice caps, hypersaline habitats, and extreme pH environments.Homology metagenomic studies, on the other hand, are designed to examine genes to identify conserved sequences that are previously associated with the expression of biologically active molecules.[67][68][69] The development of novel chemical means of incorporating phosphomimetic amino acids into proteins has provided important insight into the effects of phosphorylation events.Three general approaches for measuring protein net redistribution and diffusion are single-particle tracking, correlation spectroscopy and photomarking methods.In photomarking, a fluorescent protein can be dequenched in a subcellular area with the use of intense local illumination and the fate of the marked molecule can be imaged directly.