Our current view of the nature of light started with the pioneering work of Newton, who in the seventeenth century showed that white light was a mixture of the rainbow colours, and these could be separated by, and combined back to white light, by a prism. Other landmarks in the field were experiments by Young to show the wave nature of light by diffraction and interference patterns. The work of...

Chemical tools have proven indispensable for studies in glycobiology. Synthetic oligosaccharides and glycoconjugates provide materials for correlating structure with function. Synthetic mimics of the complex assemblies found on cell surfaces can modulate cellular interactions and are under development as therapeutic agents. Small molecule inhibitors of carbohydrate biosynthetic and processing e...

Chemical genomics. By S. Jaroch and H. Weinmann (Editors). Ernst Schering Research Foundation Workshop 58. Pp. VII+173. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006. Price 64.15 Euro. ISBN 103 54

In the last decade, studies using approaches from molecular biology have substantially advanced our understanding of the early events in olfaction and taste. The many odorants that we can recognize may well interact with many distinct receptor proteins. Of the four taste qualities that we recognize, studies on salty and sour suggest that these tastes involve ion channels in the membrane of rece...

The Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification system, recommended by the World Health Organization, categories drugs into different classes according to their therapeutic and chemical characteristics. For a set of query compounds, how can we identify which ATC-class (or classes) they belong to? It is an important and challenging problem because the information thus obtained would be ...

The laser, an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, is a source of nearly monochromatic, coherent, electromagnetic radiation that propagates as a beam. The chemical laser is a type of laser system that is driven by the release of energy during a chemical reaction. Chemical lasers are usually large, high power devices that integrate chemical delivery systems, a sup...

During chemical reactions, molecules interact to produce new molecules. Some of the reaction mechanisms are very close to the way gene combine to produce new genes. Like the classical genetic crossover operator, chemical crossover occurs when two molecules exchange the atomic material they are composed of. Molecules do so in order to produce new and more stable molecules. Several differences ex...