If you are in Gothenburg and want to know more about the Nobel Prizes in chemistry, economics or peace, now is your chance to learn more. Five of this year’s Nobel laureates and one of the 2020 laureates in economics are coming to Chalmers, the University of Gothenburg and the School of Business, Economics and Law to hold open lectures for researchers, students and anyone else who is interested.
Nobel laureate lecture to come by Morten Meldal 24 January 2023
Link to registration
Lectures by Nobel laureates in Chemistry, Piece and Economy were planned for December 2022.
Their chemistry click is simplifiing the steps towards new discoveries
The 2022 Nobel prize is about click chemistry, a method of building or combining different molecules that is used at many chemistry labs. The award is shared by Barry Sharpless from the United States, Morton Meldal from Denmark and Carolyn Bertozzi from the United States. All three are coming to Chalmers.
The term click chemistry was coined around the year 2000 by Barry Sharpless, who is now receiving his second Nobel Prize in chemistry. It is a simple, reliable form of chemistry, in which reactions are quick and avoid undesirable by-products. Immediately after and independently of each other, Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal presented what is referred to as the crown jewel of click chemistry: the copper-catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition mechanism. This is an elegant and efficient chemical reaction that has become widely used – among other things in the development of pharmaceuticals, DNA sequencing and the creation of more purpose-designed materials.
Carolyn Bertozzi took click chemistry to a new level. She developed a method to carry out cycloaddition without the copper catalyst, which allows it to be used in living organisms. Her method is now used globally to study cells and make biological processes visible. This has allowed researchers to develop more effective cancer medicines, several of which are now in the clinical trial stage.
Simplifies the work in the lab and speeds up processes
Nina Kann, professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers, has been regularly employing click chemistry for over 15 years. There has long been speculation that the method will garner a Nobel Prize, and Kann’s happiness that it has finally happened is both tangible and infectious. Listening to Nina Kann it becomes obvious that click chemistry contributes in pushing the research forward and has a bigger impact in our lives than most of us know of.
“Click chemistry has meant a lot to us chemists, but its benefit is much more far-reaching than that,” she says. The method simplifies lab work and allows us to speed up processes. For some reactions that are important in research, we can even order ready-made basic materials designed to be used in click reactions.”
She uses click chemistry in her research to develop biosensors that can detect various diseases. Biochemistry is a major field of use for the Nobel prize-winning method, but at Chalmers it is also used to develop functional materials with new properties. One example is research on materials in a photovoltaic energy system that can absorb solar energy, store it for up to 18 years and then convert it to heat and electricity as needed. Another example is in research on the material graphene.
Morten Grøtli, professor at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg, has been following the development of click chemistry since its inception. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Morten Meldal’s research team when he presented his results in the early 2000s.
“Morten Meldal was and is an incredibly skilled chemist; he thought out-of-the-box and was a real ideas man, a real inventor,” Grøtli says, pointing out that he was not a part of the Nobel prize-winning research.
These days Grøtli uses click chemistry to create bioactive molecules that can help us look into a cell and find out what is happening inside it. In his research, he often collaborates with colleagues at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers.
“Put simply, you can say that I am mostly the one who puts together the molecules, say, using click chemistry, and my colleagues characterise the substances,” Grøtli says.
Nina Kann and Morten Grøtli believe that the strong med tech industry in Gothenburg and its close collaboration with the academic world may be part of the reason that all of the 2022 Nobel laureates in chemistry are coming to the city and Chalmers.
You can read more about other researchers who work at the University of Gothenburg and use click chemistry further down in the article.