From organic chemistry to chemical biology via macromolecules with Hermann Staudinger

Phenolics: From Chemistry to Biology

In recent years, few classes of natural products have received as much attention as phenolics and polyphenols. This special issue of Molecules, “Phenolics and Polyphenolics”, is a remarkable confirmation of this trend. Several aspects related to phenolics chemistry, comprising the several classes, will be discussed. In addition, the increasing interest in phenolics’ biological activities is cov...

Synthetic biology: lessons from the history of synthetic organic chemistry.

The mid-nineteenth century saw the development of a radical new direction in chemistry: instead of simply analyzing existing molecules, chemists began to synthesize them--including molecules that did not exist in nature. The combination of this new synthetic approach with more traditional analytical approaches revolutionized chemistry, leading to a deep understanding of the fundamental principl...

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: 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 ...