NUNZIUM

Carolyn R. Bertozzi (USA, 55), Morten Meldal (DK, 68), and Barry Sharpless (USA, 81) are the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022, awarded “or the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”. Sharpless and Meldal have laid the foundation by describing the process for the first time in two independent but very similar works. Bertozzi (the 8th woman in history awarded with this Nobel) has taken click chemistry to a new dimension and started utilizing it in living organisms. Click chemistry is not a single specific reaction but describes a way of generating products by joining small modular units. By the union of biomolecules and molecular probes, they have been made notably useful in the detection, localization, and qualification of biomolecules in vivo. However, the method is not limited to biological conditions: the concept of a "click" reaction has been used in chemoproteomic, pharmacological, and various biomimetic applications. The reason for such widespread use is that these reactions are in general able to occur in relatively simple conditions, are not disturbed by water, generate little and inoffensive byproducts, and happen quickly with high characteristic yield. These qualities make click reactions particularly suitable to the problem of isolating and targeting molecules in complex biological environments. In such environments, products accordingly need to be physiologically stable and any byproducts need to be non-toxic (for in vivo systems). Their work finds even further application in all those industries and research fields where molecules need precision design and production, such as nanotechnology, pharmacology, and materials engineering.