Like the Nobel Prize in Physics, this year’s promotion in the chemistry category was long awaited by specialists, as the rewarded work has been disseminated in laboratories and has made life easier for many scientists for the past twenty years.
American Carolyn R. Bertozzi, 55 (Stanford University), Dane Morten Meldal, 68 (University of Copenhagen), and American K. Barry Sharpless, 81 (Scripps Research), are rewarded for their invention of original and now widely used methods of synthesis, “click chemistry” for the last two, and bioorthogonal chemistry for the one who is the eighth woman to receive this prestigious medal in this discipline. Barry Sharpless is the second chemist, after the Briton Frederick Sanger, to receive two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry; the first was awarded to him in 2001 for selective synthesis methods.
“The reaction invented by Sharpless is fantastic and it’s a genius idea, but it’s also a good marketing move with this name – ‘click chemistry’ – which speaks to everyone, even non-chemists”says Jean-François Nierengarten, CNRS research director at the Molecular Materials Chemistry Laboratory in Strasbourg.
The name indeed summarizes all the salt of the method. If the art of chemistry is to assemble molecules, it is not always easy, and the technique developed independently by Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal in 2002 makes it possible to assemble together almost any block or molecular fragments. Making large chains of atoms, adding a luminescent part, making molecules with several branches… become tasks accessible to the greatest number of benches.
The winners have actually invented a sort of Lego: to assemble two different molecules, you add a “pin” to one block and a “hole” to the other so that they fit together. In fact of pin and hole, chemists speak of alkyne, two carbons linked by a triple bond as in acetylene, and azide, three nitrogens linked together.
A first article in 2001
Then, in a “click”, these two parts bind, allowing the assembly of what is desired, with in the middle a ring of three nitrogens and two carbons. Easy ? Except that, if a third element is not added, the result is quite variable and unwanted products are obtained. Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal found that adding copper produced exactly the expected product and only this product.
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