Chemical genetics: Reshaping biology through chemistry

Chemical genetics: reshaping biology through chemistry.

To understand biological processes, biologists typically study how perturbations of protein functions affect the phenotype. Protein activity in living cells can be influenced in many different ways: by manipulation of the genomic information, by injecting inhibitory antibodies, or, more recently, by the use of ribonucleic acid-medicated interference (RNAi). All these methods have proven to be e...

Chemical Biology/ Chemical Genetics/ Chemical Genomics: Importance of Chemical Library

A new field of science, chemical biology/ chemical genetics/ chemical genomics (cb/cg/cg) has emerged since the late 1990's, especially in the United States. The NIH Roadmap agenda, Molecular Libraries Screening Center Network (MLSCN), became a drive force to push cb/cg/cg forward. Cb/cg/cg studies consist of three methodologies, chemical libraries with small molecules, high-throughput screenin...

Chemical biology: Chromatin chemistry goes cellular.

Chemical biology meets biological chemistry minireview series.

What is the difference between “biological chemistry” and “chemical biology?” One of us (J. M. G.) received his Ph.D. at an institution where the biochemistry building was called the Laboratory of Chemical Biology, but that was a long time ago, and things have changed. Biological chemistry (or biochemistry), that is the study of life processes at the molecular level, is now quite distinct from ...

Chemical genetics: tailoring tools for cell biology.

Chemical genetics is a research approach that uses small molecules as probes to study protein functions in cells or whole organisms. Here, I review the parallels between classical genetic and chemical-genetic approaches and discuss the merits of small molecules to dissect dynamic cellular processes. I then consider the pros and cons of different screening approaches and specify strategies aimed...