Chemical biology is a recent addition to the scientific lexicon, and although its origin involves the use of small molecules to perturb and study biological function, it has recently grown to encompass a wide array of science at the interface between chemistry and biology. Like other multidisciplinary fields, chemical biology thrives because chemists and biologists have unique perspectives and skills that complement each other. For this reason, these collaborative efforts may be able to unravel complex biological problems.

The importance of this growing field can be seen in recent policy initiatives. In 2003, the creation of the US National Institutes of Health Roadmap (http://nihroadmap.nih.gov) led, for example, to the establishment of chemical-genomics screening centres and PubChem (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov), a cheminformatics database that is the small-molecule equivalent of PubMed. In addition, several of the recently appointed Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators (http://www.hhmi.org/news/032105_list.html) have a significant chemical component to their research.

A year ago, Nature boosted its editorial resources specifically to respond to this trend. And this month our publishers have gone a major step further and launched Nature Chemical Biology (see http://www.nature.com/nchembio). As with all Nature journals, the new one represents a desire to meet the needs of a community without in any way reducing the commitment of Nature itself to publish high-quality papers in the field. Our aim is that Nature Chemical Biology will rapidly become the home of the strongest research for chemical biologists.

Chemical biology is often the lens that allows the biological community to see what chemists are capable of doing. It is our intention, in both Nature and Nature Chemical Biology, to illuminate the strengths and needs of these two communities and to stimulate new collaborations and scientific insights.