Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded To 3 Scientists for Work ‘Snapping Molecules Together’

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless on Wednesday for the development of click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry — work that has “led to a revolution in how chemists think about linking molecules together,” the Nobel committee said.  Dr. Bertozzi is the eighth woman to be awarded the prize, and Dr. Sharpless is the fifth scientist to be honored with two Nobels, the committee noted. Johan Aqvist, the chair of the chemistry committee, said that this year’s prize dealt with “not overcomplicating matters, instead working with what is easy and simple.”

“Click chemistry is almost like it sounds,” he said of a field whose name Dr. Sharpless coined in 2000. “It’s all about snapping molecules together. Imagine that you could attach small chemical buckles to different types of building blocks. Then you could link these buckles together and produce molecules of greater complexity and variation.” Shortly after Dr. Sharpless coined the concept, both he and Dr. Meldal independently discovered a chemical reaction called copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, known today as the crown jewel of click chemistry. “When this reaction was discovered, it was like opening the floodgates,” Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a briefing after the laureates were announced. “We were using it everywhere, to build everything.” Dr. Bertozzi, a chemist and professor at Stanford, was able to apply this reaction to biomolecules, often found on cell surfaces, in living organisms without affecting the chemistry of the cells she was observing. Before her extensive research with glycans, or sugar chains, scientists’ understanding of this subfield of glycobiology had been hampered by an inability to see molecules in action in living cells.