In 2007, scientists published a paper that laid out a recipe for a new type of biochemistry. The method would allow scientists to see what was happening in organisms in real time.
Sharpless had laid out a vision for “click chemistry” — a way to rapidly build complex biological molecules by snapping smaller subunits together…
Her process involved incorporating a carbohydrate molecule modified with azide into glycans in living cells. When they added a ring-shaped alkyne molecule that was bound to a green fluorescent protein, the azide and alkyne clicked together and the glowing green protein revealed where the glycans were in the cell.
Bertozzi dubbed the process “bioorthogonal” click chemistry — so named because it would be orthogonal to — that is, would not interfere with — the biological processes occurring in the cell. Her work has proved crucial in understanding how small molecules move through living cells. It has been used to track glycans in zebrafish embryos, to see how cancer cells mark themselves safe from immune attack using the sugar molecules, and to develop radioactive “tracers” for biomedical imaging. And click chemistry more broadly has supercharged the process of drug discovery.
In 2022, Sharpless, Meldal and Bertozzi earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on click chemistry.
