NOBEL PRIZE WINNER IN CHEMISTRY (2022) - CAROLYN R. BERTOZZI

 

CAROLYN R. BERTOZZI :

Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry :

 

 

ABOUT:

Carolyn R. Bertozzi better known by her family name Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi is a popular American chemist born on October 10, 1966, in the United States, and grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts. She started her career as a chemist and became one of the most famous chemists at the age of 54 years old group. She was jointly awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry when she spent her formative and most creative years in Berkeley. She also served as director of a Berkeley Lab nanoscience facility. 

 

EDUCATION:

After graduating from Harvard University in 1988, she earned her PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1993 and following postdoctoral and faculty positions elsewhere, returned to join the chemistry faculty and Berkeley Lab in 1996.

 

RECOGNITION:

An American chemist, Carolyn R. Bertozzi is known for her work on biorthogonal chemistry, a term she coined. At Stanford University, she holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Bertozzi is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and is the former Director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research centre at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After receiving the MacArthur “Genius” award at age 33, being honoured as the first woman to receive the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize faculty award, being a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005), the Institute of Medicine (2011), and the National Academy of Inventors (2013), she has been a role model for many students and colleagues.

 

WORK:

Bertozzi was recognized for founding the field of biorthogonal chemistry, a set of chemical reactions that allow researchers to study molecules and their interactions in living things without interfering with natural biological processes.  Thus, Biorthogonal chemistry was a tool that her lab created originally to study cell surface sugars — in fact, to image cell surface sugars using microscopes. Bertozzi’s lab first developed the methods in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, her lab and others have used them to answer fundamental questions about the role of sugars in biology, to solve practical problems, such as developing better tests for infectious diseases, and to create a new biological pharmaceutical that can better target tumours, which is now being tested in clinical trials.

Bertozzi’s development of biorthogonal chemistry – a term Bertozzi coined, which means “not interacting with biology” – grew out of an interest in complex carbohydrate molecules, called glycans. Along with proteins and nucleic acids such as DNA, they are one of the key building blocks of life and also one of the least well understood – in large part because they are hard to make in the lab and when Bertozzi began her career, one of the hardest to analyse.

Then, after working for years to understand the structure and function of one glycan, Bertozzi had an idea: What if she could attach fluorescent tags to sugar molecules so that she could literally see where the sugars were in live cells? The tricky part wasn’t attaching a fluorescent tag, however. Instead, it was attaching that tag in a way that didn’t interfere with what the sugar and all the other molecules in the cell were supposed to be doing.

Bertozzi, along with a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues tried a number of different chemical reactions to make it work, but eventually dug up a roughly hundred-year-old process called the Staudinger reaction, and modified it for their purposes. The reaction, now known as Staudinger ligation or Staudinger-Bertozzi ligation, allowed her to attach fluorescent tags to specially modified sugar molecules after the sugar molecules had already been incorporated into a cell – all without reactions that would muck up a cell’s biochemistry. For the first time, chemists could actually see how sugars were distributed on the surface of a cell, but the discovery also opened the door to studying chemistry as it actually happens in living things, one of the most complex chemical environments imaginable.

Looking for a way to speed up her biorthogonal process, Bertozzi saw potential in a reaction Sharpless and Meldal (co-prize winners) is covered independently, called copper-catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition. This reaction, already the crown jewel of click chemistry, required modification for use in living cells because it would introduce copper into a cell, which is toxic. Inspired by chemistry from classic textbooks, Bertozzi’s lab modified the reaction, resulting in copper-free click chemistry. This faster version of biorthogonal chemistry allowed Bertozzi to track the activity of glycans in cells over time.

Since their development, Bertozzi’s biorthogonal reactions and derivatives thereof have been used to study how cells build proteins and other molecules, to develop new cancer medicines, and to produce new materials for energy storage, among many other applications.

It was a really a privilege to watch, how the success of Bertozzi’s discoveries unfolded, on the Berkeley campus and beyond. On the behalf of  Department of Chemical Engineers (QUIMICA), we extend our heartiest congratulations to Carolyn R. Bertozzi for her spectacular work and this well-deserved honour.

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