The Day the Classroom Flipped: Lessons Learned from Interdisciplinary Science Education Online

The Covid‐19 pandemic, evolving needs of students & mentors, and the drive for global educational equality are collectively shifting how courses are packaged/distributed, ushering a more holistic approach and blending of fields. We recently created interdisciplinary courses in chemical biology aimed at massive open online and small private levels. These courses cover biology, chemistry, & physics, and concepts underlying modern chemical‐biology tools. We discuss what we learned while creating/overseeing these courses: content optimization and maintaining material freshness while fostering a stimulating learning environment. We outline mechanisms that help sustain student attention throughout rapidly‐moving courses, how to integrate adaptability to students’ needs in the short & long term, and speculate how we could have improved. We believe this will be an important guide for anyone wanting to develop online learning formats ideal for nurturing interdisciplinary scientists of tomorrow.

7 Tetrazine-Based Cycloadditions in Click Chemistry

The spontaneous cycloaddition of tetrazines with a number of different dienophiles has become a powerful tool in chemical biology, in particular for the biocompatible conjugation and modification of (bio)molecules. The exceptional reaction kinetics made these bioorthogonal ligations the methods of choice for time-critical processes at very low concentrations, facilitating controlled molecular transformations in complex environments and even in vivo. The emerging concept of bond-cleavage reactions triggered by tetrazine-based cycloadditions enabled the design of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. The tetrazine-triggered activation of prodrugs represents the first bioorthogonal reaction performed in humans, marking the beginning of the era of clinical translation of bioorthogonal chemistry. This chapter provides an overview of the synthesis and reactivity of tetrazines, their cycloadditions with various dienophiles, and transformations triggered by these reactions, focusing on reaction mechanisms, kinetics and efficiency, and selected applications.

High-Effective Gene Delivery Based on Cyclodextrins Multivalent Assembly in Target Cancer Cells

Nucleic acids condensation and controlled release remain significant challenges of gene therapy in chemical biology and nanotechnology fields. In this work, we have reported a polysaccharide supramolecular assembly constructed by...

Chemical-Biology-derived in vivo Sensors: Past, Present, and Future

To understand the complex biochemistry and biophysics of biological systems, one needs to be able to monitor local concentrations of molecules, physical properties of macromolecular assemblies and activation status of signaling pathways, in real time, within single cells, and at high spatio-temporal resolution. Here we look at the tools that have been / are being / need to be provided by chemical biology to address these challenges. In particular, we highlight the utility of molecular probes that help to better measure mechanical forces and flux through key signalling pathways. Chemical biology can be used to both build biosensors to visualize, but also actuators to perturb biological processes. An emergent theme is the possibility to multiplex measurements of multiple cellular processes. Advances in microscopy automation now allow us to acquire datasets for 1000's of cells. This produces high dimensional datasets that require computer vision approaches that automate image analysis. The high dimensionality of these datasets are often not immediately accessible to human intuition, and, similarly to 'omics technologies, require statistical approaches for their exploitation. The field of biosensor imaging is therefore experiencing a multidisciplinary transition that will enable it to realize its full potential as a tool to provide a deeper appreciation of cell physiology.

Chemical Biology Tools to Study Lipids and their Metabolism with Increased Spatial and Temporal Resolution

Lipids are important cellular components providing many essential functions. To fulfill these various functions evolution has selected for a diverse set of lipids and this diversity is seen at the organismal, cellular and subcellular level. Understanding how cells maintain this complex lipid organization is a very challenging problem, which for lipids, is not easily addressed using biochemical and genetic techniques. Therefore, chemical tools have an important role to play in our quest to understand the complexities of lipid metabolism. Here we discuss new chemical tools to study lipids, their distribution and metabolism with increased spatial and temporal resolution.

Flipper Probes for the Community

This article describes four fluorescent membrane tension probes that have been designed, synthesized, evaluated, commercialized and applied to current biology challenges in the context of the NCCR Chemical Biology. Their names are Flipper-TR®, ER Flipper-TR®, Lyso Flipper-TR®, and Mito Flipper-TR®. They are available from Spirochrome.