Toxic-free click chemistry a first on a living organism
For the first time, the widely used molecular synthesis technique known as click chemistry has been safely applied to a living organism. Researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have crafted a unique copper-free version of click chemistry to create biomolecular probes for in vivo studies of live mice. Conventional click chemistry reactions require a copper catalyst that is toxic to cells and organisms.
“We developed a variant of the click chemistry reactions that possesses comparable kinetics to the conventional copper-catalyzed reactions, only without the requirement of a toxic metal,” says Carolyn Bertozzi, a Berkeley Lab-UC Berkeley chemist who leads this research. “Our latest studies have now established copper-free click chemistry as a bioorthogonal reaction that can be executed in the physiologically relevant context of a mouse.”
SOURCE: R&D