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05/10/22 22:35 PM IST

Nobel Prize in Chemistry announced

In News 
  • The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 has gone to Carolyn R Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K Barry Sharpless, the latter winning the second Nobel of his career.
About Research 
  • The three have been awarded for their work in ‘click chemistry’, in which molecules snap together fast and firmly, without the need for a long, complicated process and too many unwanted byproducts.
  • Their work has applications in the field of medical science, including the treatment of cancer.
  • Bertozzi is based at Stanford University in California, Sharpless with Scripps Research, California, and Meldal is at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
  • Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 because they brought chemistry into the era of functionalism and laid the foundations of click chemistry.
  • They share the prize with Carolyn Bertozzi, who took click chemistry to a new dimension and began using it to map cells.
  • Her bioorthogonal reactions are now contributing to more targeted cancer treatments, among many other applications.
Click Chemistry 
  • Chemists often try to recreate complex chemical molecules found in nature, and this has applications, among other things, in the field of medicine – how to target and block pathogens in cells.
  • However, this process can be complicated and time-consuming.
  • If chemists choose simple reactions – where there is a strong intrinsic drive for the molecules to bond together – they avoid many of the side reactions, with a minimal loss of material. Sharpless called this robust method for building molecules click chemistry, saying that even if click chemistry cannot provide exact copies of natural molecules, it will be possible to find molecules that fulfil the same functions.
Applications 
  • Meldal through his experiments came up with the useful chemical structure called triazoles, whch are stable and are found in pharmaceuticals, dyes and agricultural chemicals, says the Nobel website.
  • He also found that the reaction he used could bind together numerous different molecules.
  • Bertozzi, using the work of Sharpless and Meldal, came up with an efficient and innovative method to map glycans, which are carbohydrate-based polymers made by all living organisms.
Source- Indian Express 

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