The American Carolyn R. Bertozzi, the Danish Morten Meldal and the American Barry Sharpless were distinguished for the development of ecological techniques of synthesis of molecules.
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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 have facilitated the lives of many scientists since twenty ‘years.
The American Carolyn R. Bertozzi, 55 (Stanford University), the Danish Morten Meldal, 68 years old (Copenhagen University) and the American Karl Barry Sharpless, 81 years old (Scripps Research), are rewarded for their invention Original and now very widespread synthetic methods, chemistry-click, for the last two, and bioorthogonal chemistry for the eighth woman to receive this prestigious medal in this discipline. Barry Sharpless is the second chemist, after the British Frederick Sanger, to receive two Nobel Prize winners of chemistry; The first had been awarded to him in 2001 for selective synthesis methods.
“The reaction invented by Sharpless is fantastic and it is an idea of genius, but it is also a good marketing blow with this name – chemistry -click – which speaks to everyone, even to non -chemists” , estimates Jean-François Nierengarten, CNRS research director at the laboratory of chemistry of molecular materials in Strasbourg.
The name sums up in Effect all the salt of the method. If the art of chemistry is to assemble the molecules, it is not always easy, and the technique developed independently by Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal in 2002 makes it possible to assemble between them almost any block or molecular fragments. Make large atom channels, add a luminescent part, make molecules with several branches … become tasks accessible to the greatest number of beards.
The winners in fact invented a kind of Lego: to assemble two different molecules, we add a “picot” to a block and a “hole” to the other so that they fit. In fact of Picot and hole, the chemists speak of Alcyne, two carbons linked by a triple bond as in acetylene, and of azoture, three azotes linked to each other.
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 azotes and two carbon. 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 made it possible to have exactly the expected product and only this product.
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