Chemical Biology

A very warm welcome to you, our new recruits! We'll start you off by acquainting you with the answers to big questions like why study chemical biology and what makes it special. We'll then show some highlights of the course that you are about to take. Finally, we want you to understand some fundamentals, so we are going to start off with some core concepts framed from the perspective of chemical biology.

A picture used to paint a thousand words. But with the advent of multiple color imaging, microscopy can open a lens with which to view life that few other techniques are capable of. We are thus going to take you on a colorful tour that will show you specific fluorophores, explain why different fluorophores have different colors, and how to rationalize why a molecule is fluorescent. Then we will use these fluorophores in cells, to visualize important cellular processes.

Here we will discuss how different fluorescent techniques have found fantastically useful applications to understand specific biological regulation processes in vitro and in live cells. We will focus on chromatin regulation and regulation of membrane tension as these are two systems which, without such techniques, we would not have the level of understanding we have today.

The classical view of biological science is the laboratory worker working hard to understand a specific protein of interest. But through chemical biology, we have been able to employ proteins to do some of this important work for us. In this module you will learn how to deploy modified protein domains to perform custom-designed functions using light-based techniques as a readout.