Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University, Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen, and K. Barry Sharpless of Scripps Research won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry,” methods that have been applied in drug development and studying disease.
Click chemistry, true to its name, “clicks” together molecules much more easily and precisely than traditional chemical reactions. Sharpless coined the idea of click chemistry around 2000, and Meldal and Sharpless developed click reactions independently of each other shortly after. Bertozzi, interested in studying the sugar molecules called glycans on the surfaces of cells, a few years later developed click reactions that were possible without the copper catalyst, which allowed the reaction to occur in cells and the visualization of these glycans — which she termed “bioorthogonal chemistry.”