Combinatorial Chemistry in Biology

Prof. Chi-Huey Wong received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from National Taiwan University, and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. He started his independent career as Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University in 1983, where he became Full Professor in 1987. He has been Professor and Ernest W. Hahn Chair in Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute since 1989 and is also a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology since 1996. Professor Wong is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a recipient of The Searle Scholar Award in Biomedical Sciences (1985), the Presidential Young Investigator Award in Chemistry (1986), the American Chemical Society A.C. Cope Scholar Award (1993), the Roy Whistler Award of the International Carbohydrate Organization (1994), the American Chemical Society Harrison Howe Award in Chemistry (1998) and the Claude S. Hudson Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry (1999), the International Enzyme Engineering Award (1999) and the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2000). He is a member of Academia Sinica, Taipei (1994), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1996) and the US National Academy of Sciences (2002). He serves as editor-in-chief of Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry and is an executive board member of the Tetrahedron Publications. He was head of the Frontier Research Program on Glycotechnology at RIKEN (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, Japan) (1991-1999) and is currently a scientific advisor of the Max-Planck Institute, a board member of the U.S. National Research Council on Chemical Sciences and Technology, and is a founding scientist of Optimer Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He is author and co-author of over 450 publications, 60 patents and several books. His current interests are in the areas of bioorganic and synthetic chemistry and biocatalysis, including development of new synthetic chemistry based on enzymatic and chemo-enzymatic reactions, synthetic approach to carbohydrate-mediated biological recognition, design and synthesis of mechanism-based inhibitors of enzymes, RNA and carbohydrate receptors, development of oligosaccharide and aminoglycoside microarrays for high-throughput screening and the study of reaction mechanisms.

The essence of combinatorial chemistry or techniques involving "molecular diversity" is to generate enormous populations of molecules and to exploit appropriate screening techniques to isolate active components contained in these libraries. This idea has been the focus of research both in academia and in the pharmaceutical or biotechnology industry. Its developments go hand in hand with an exploding number of potential drug targets emerging from genomics and proteomics research. When the editors of Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology encouraged us to assemble the present volume on Combinatorial Chemistry in Biology, we immediately felt that this might prove quite beneficial for the audience of this series. The field of combinatorial chemistry extends over a broad range of disciplines, from synthetic organic chemistry to biochemistry, from material sciences to cell biology. Each of these fields may have its own view on this topic, something which is reflected in a growing number of monographs and "special editions" of jour nals devoted to this issue or aspects thereof. The title of the present volume of Springer-Verlag's series suggests that it also has its own special focus. And, generally speaking, this is not wrong: we would even claim the special focus of this volume is on the immunologically relevant aspects of combinatorial chemistry.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

List of Contents.- Peptide Libraries in Cellular Immune Recognition.- Antigen Sequence- and Library-Based Mapping of Linear and Discontinuous Protein-Protein-Interaction Sites by Spot Synthesis.- The Two Hybrid Toolbox.- Evolutionary Approaches to Protein Engineering.- Phage Display of Combinatorial Peptide and Protein Libraries and Their Applications in Biology and Chemistry.- In Vitro Selection Methods for Screening of Peptide and Protein Libraries.- Aptamers as Tools in Molecular Biology and Immunology.- In Vitro Selection of Nucleic Acid Enzymes.- Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry: Evolutionary Formation and Screening of Molecular Libraries.- Evolutionary Biotechnology - Reflections and Perspectives.