Click and collect the Nobel Prize in chemistry

Published date01 December 2022
The discoveries of click and bio-orthogonal chemistries have gone on to spark new potentials, including more environmentally friendly chemical processes and more targeted medicines, as well as discovering more about how cells respond to viruses and disease. And this month, Barry Sharpless, Morten Meldal and Carolyn Bertozzi will receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022 for those insights

Waiting for the click One person who was not surprised by the Nobel nod for click and bio-orthogonal chemistries was Dr Elisa Fadda, a glycobiologist at Maynooth University.

"I had been expecting this for years," she says, describing how her lab was together for its regular group meeting at the time that the chemistry Nobel was being announced. "One of my students brought up the live feed on his phone, but I don't speak Swedish so I didn't understand a bit of it," says Dr Fadda.

That was until she heard the names Morton Meldal and Barry Sharpless, who independently invented click chemistry, and Carolyn Bertozzi, who discovered bio-orthogonal chemistry that can run in living systems.

"We started screaming and jumping around, I was as excited as if my native Italy had won the World Cup," Dr Fadda recalls. "We put a picture up on Twitter of our group celebrating and Carolyn Bertozzi liked it, she has been a huge supporter of our work, it was all just incredible."

Efficiency upgrade So what exactly is click chemistry? It's a decades-old chemical reaction that got a serious efficiency upgrade around the 2000s, explains associate professor Andrew Kellett at Dublin City University, who today uses click chemistry to develop DNA-based medicines.

"The reaction on which click chemistry is founded was first understood back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where an azide chemical group reacts with an alkyne chemical group and they lock together very specifically and tightly," explains Prof Kellett.

This early reaction was inefficient though, and decades later, Barry Sharpless and Morton Meldal each found that using copper as a catalyst could make this reaction faster, more specific and more environmentally friendly.

"The copper-catalysed reaction could be carried out in water, you didn't need harsh solvents and you got high yields of a 'clean' product," says Prof Kellett.

"This was the cream of the crop in terms of catalysing the reaction, it was a game-changer."

All very interesting, but why was this important? Because the "click" between the azide and the alkyne provides a...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT