Chemistry and Biology — Historical and Philosophical Aspects

Chemistry on Nucleic Acid Templates

“…Combinatorial chemistry aims to improve the efficiency of the search for new functional small molecules, which are highly demanded as pharmaceuticals and as research tools [13] [111]. Libraries with hundreds of thousands of natural product-like chemical compounds are constructed, typically in a split-and-pool approach [13]. After synthetic coupling steps on solid support, the beads are recombined (pooled), mixed, and separated (split) again for the next coupling step to give complex and structurally diverse libraries [112].…”

“…Encoding Combinatorial Libraries. Combinatorial chemistry aims to improve the efficiency of the search for new functional small molecules, which are highly demanded as pharmaceuticals and as research tools [13] [111]. Libraries with hundreds of thousands of natural product-like chemical compounds are constructed, typically in a split-and-pool approach [13].…”

“…Particular attention will be devoted to the added value of NAs for chemistry, since several excellent reviews on NA templating have been published in recent years [9 -12]. In the tradition of chemical biology [13], we will discuss how the biological principles that are inherent to NAs can be used to advance chemistry, which, in turn, fuels advances in biology. Most examples will concern DNA templates, but RNA and some NA analogs will also be treated.…”

Challenges and Perspectives of Chemical Biology, a Successful Multidisciplinary Field of Natural Sciences

“…For example, “top-down” analysis begins with a cell, a tissue, a limb, or an organism itself, and ends at the molecular level with the molecules that participate in its complex intra- and/or interactions. From chemistry’s molecules and native macromolecules “bottom-up” synthesis begins in the direction of increasing complexity to reach the totality of the cell and its higher organizations emerging through modular motives and supramodular functional units [ 1 ].Since 1839 it has been recognized (Schwann and Schleiden) that the cell is the simplest unit in living organisms. Furthermore, the cell is a protected region, in which diverse small molecules and macromolecular clusters (both kinds of molecules are endogenous) interact with each other in a harmony that is reached by auto-assembling.…”