Objects, goals, and main methods as well as perspectives of chemical biology are discussed. This review is focused on the fundamental aspects of this emerging field of life sciences: chemical space, the small molecule library and chemical sensibiliza...
Asparagine-linked N-glycans on proteins have diverse structures, and their functions vary according to their structures. In recent years, it has become possible to obtain high quantities of N-glycans via isolation and chemical/enzymatic/chemoenzymati...
Protein kinases represent a very pharmacologically attractive class of targets; however, some members of the family still remain rather unexplored. The biology and therapeutic potential of cdc-like kinases (CLKs) have been explored mainly over the la...
How can diversity-oriented strategies for chemical synthesis provide chemical tools to help shape our understanding of complex cancer pathways and progress anti-cancer drug discovery efforts? This review (surveying the literature from 2003 to the pr...
Advances in combinatorial synthesis and high-throughput screening methods have led to renewed interest in synthetic plant immunity activators as well as priming agents. 3,5-Dichloroanthranilic acid (3,5-DCAA) is a derivative of anthranilic acid that...
Efficient detection and observation of dynamic RNA changes remain a tremendous challenge. However, the continuous development of fluorescence applications in recent years enhances the efficacy of RNA imaging. Here we summarize some of these developme...
Lipid-derived plant hormone jasmonates are implicated in plant growth, reproductive performance, senescence, secondary metabolite productions, and defense against both necrotrophic pathogens and feeding insects. A major jasmonate is (+)-7-iso-jasmono...
The Chemical Biology Section of Molecules, like the discipline it represents, is diverse, dynamic, and growing rapidly [...]
Metabolomics has become a powerful tool in chemical biology. Profiling the human sterolome has resulted in the discovery of noncanonical sterols, including oxysterols and meiosis-activating sterols. They are important to immune responses and developm...
Covalent inhibitors have experienced a revival in medicinal chemistry and chemical biology in recent decades [...]
The use of light-activated chemical probes to study biological interactions was first discovered in the 1960s, and has since found many applications in studying diseases and gaining deeper insight into various cellular mechanisms involving protein&nd...
Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) serves as an essential redox co-factor and mediator of multiple biological processes. Besides its well-established role in electron transfer reactions, NAD serves as a substrate for other biotransformations, wh...
Chemical biology and drug discovery are two scientific activities that pursue different goals but complement each other. The former is an interventional science that aims at understanding living systems through the modulation of its molecular compone...
Lipid membranes are common to all forms of life. While being stable barriers that delimitate the cell as the fundamental organismal unit, biological membranes are highly dynamic by allowing for lateral diffusion, transbilayer passage via selective ch...
This review article is the first in a series that provides an overview of the biology, chemistry, biological effects, and applications of Lavandula × intermedia (lavandin, LI). Despite its prevalence in cultivation and on the essential oil mark...
Continued expansion of the chemical biology toolbox presents many new and diverse opportunities to interrogate the fundamental molecular mechanisms driving complex plant–microbe interactions. This review will examine metabolic labeling with cli...
Chemical transformations that take advantage of biocatalysis are of great interest to chemists [...]
Chemical genetics is an approach for identifying small molecules with the ability to induce a biological phenotype or to interact with a particular gene product, and it is an emerging tool for lead generation in drug discovery. Accordingly, there is...
Chemical probes are of central relevance for chemical biology. To unambiguously explore the role of target proteins in triggering or mediating biological functions, small molecules used as probes should ideally be target-specific; at least, they shou...
The Eighth Central European Conference “Chemistry towards Biology” was held in Brno, Czech Republic, on August 28–September 1, 2016 to bring together experts in biology, chemistry and design of bioactive compounds; promote the exchange of scientific...
The elevation of Synthetic Biology from single cells to multicellular simulations would be a significant scale-up. The spatiotemporal behavior of cellular populations has the potential to be prototyped in silico for computer assisted design through e...
The knowledge of interactions between different molecules is undoubtedly the driving force of all contemporary biomedical and biological sciences. Chemical biology/biological chemistry has become an important multidisciplinary bridge connecting the p...
Here we describe a chemical biology approach for elucidating potential toxicity mechanisms for thrombosis-related side effects. This work takes advantage of a large chemical biology data set comprising the effects of known, well-characterized referen...
Bioscience is an interdisciplinary venture. Driven by a quantum shift in the volume of high throughput data and in ready availability of data-intensive technologies, mathematical and quantitative approaches have become increasingly common in bioscien...
Research into the biology of plant viruses, their mechanisms of pathogenicity, and the induction of host resistance has laid a solid foundation for the discovery of antiviral agents and their targets and the development of effective control technolog...
Komagataella phaffii (formerly Pichia pastoris) is a methylotrophic yeast widely used in laboratories around the world to produce recombinant proteins. Given its advantageous features, it has also gained much interest in the context of modern biotech...
Marine systems are very diverse and recognized as being sources of a wide range of biomolecules. This review provides an overview of metabolite profiling based on mass spectrometry (MS) approaches in marine organisms and their environments, focusing...
Individuals across their lifespan may experience hearing loss from medications or chemicals, prompting concern about ototoxic environmental exposures. This study applies computational modeling as a screening-level hazard identification and chemical p...
The recent and important advances in bottom-up synthetic biology (SB), in particular in the field of the so-called “synthetic cells” (SCs) (or “artificial cells”, or “protocells”), lead us to consider the role of w...
The fundamentals of how protein–protein/RNA/DNA interactions influence the structures and functions of the workhorses from the cells have been well documented in the 20th century. A diverse set of methods exist to determine such interactions between...
Due to the specific properties provided by fluorine atoms to biomolecules, amino acids with fluorinated side chains are of great interest for medicinal chemistry and chemical biology. Among them, α-fluoroalkyl-α-amino acids constitute a u...
Chemical reaction networks can be utilised as basic components for nucleic acid feedback control systems’ design for Synthetic Biology application. DNA hybridisation and programmed strand-displacement reactions are effective primitives for impl...
2 February 2016
A growing body of evidence suggests chemicals present in air, water, soil, food, building materials and household products are toxicants that contribute to the many chronic diseases typically seen in routine medical practice. Yet, despite calls from...
Activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) has emerged as a powerful chemical proteomics approach for profiling active amino acid residues, mapping functional proteins, and guiding covalent drug development in complex biological systems. Recent methodol...
Diptera are among the most serious arthropod pests affecting mushroom crops. Phorid flies, especially Megaselia halterata, have traditionally been globally considered as a minor pest, although they are a very important problem on Spanish mushroom far...
The potential role of bottom-up Synthetic Cells (SCs) in the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT) is discussed. In particular, this perspective paper focuses on the growing interest in networks of biological and/or artificial objects at the micro- and...
Cancer vaccines have been considered promising therapeutic strategies and are often constructed from whole cells, attenuated pathogens, carbohydrates, peptides, nucleic acids, etc. However, the use of whole organisms or pathogens can elicit unwanted...
Pheromones are neuronal signals that stimulate conspecific individuals to react to environmental stressors or stimuli. Research on the ascaroside (ascr) pheromones in Caenorhabditis elegans and other nematodes has made great progress since ascr#1 was...
The protein kinase Mps1 (monopolar spindle 1) is an important regulator of the Spindle Assembly Checkpoint (SAC), the evolutionary conserved checkpoint system of higher organisms that monitors the proper bipolar attachment of all chromosomes to the m...
Predicting compounds with single- and multi-target activity and exploring origins of compound specificity and promiscuity is of high interest for chemical biology and drug discovery. We present a large-scale analysis of compound promiscuity including...
Sorghum halepense (L.) Pers is a common and noxious worldwide weed of increasing distribution in many European countries. In the present review, information on the biology, ecology, agricultural, economic and environmental impact of johnsongrass is g...
The title compound, 4,4-dichloro-1,3-dithietane-2-one, was encountered when opening a commercial capped amber bottle labeled “thiophosgene” that had been stored in a cold room (4 °C) for decades without any special precautions. Treati...
By studying the literature about tetracyclines (TCs), it becomes clearly evident that TCs are very dynamic molecules. In some cases, their structure-activity-relationship (SAR) are well known, especially against bacteria, while against other targets,...
Raman spectroscopy is a popular non-invasive spectroscopic technique for molecular characterization and imaging with a high spatial resolution [...]
Fluorescent protein biosensors are powerful cellular systems biology tools for dissecting the complexity of cellular processes with high spatial and temporal resolution. As regulated nucleo-cytoplasmic transport is crucial for the modulation of numer...
Exposure to different substances in an occupational environment is of utmost concern to global agencies such as the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization. Interest in improving work health conditions, particularly of tho...
C-Mannosylation is a post-translational modification of proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum. Monomeric α-mannose is attached to specific Trp residues at the first Trp in the Trp-x-x-Trp/Cys (W-x-x-W/C) motif of substrate proteins, by the action of...
SET7, serving as the only histone methyltransferase that monomethylates ‘Lys-4’ of histone H3, has been proved to function as a key regulator in diverse biological processes, such as cell proliferation, transcriptional network regulation in embryonic...
Biologically active small molecules have a central role in drug development, and as chemical probes and tool compounds to perturb and elucidate biological processes. Small molecules can be rationally designed for a given target, or a library of molec...
The impact of the gut microbiota on human physiology through their vast metabolic activities has surfaced as a remarkable scientific discovery over the past decade [...]
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