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Grand Challenge Commentary: The chemistry of a dynamic genome

Nature Chemical Biology volume 6, pages 866–868 (2010)Cite this article

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In the postsequencing era, chemical biology is uniquely situated to investigate genomic DNA alterations arising through epigenetic modifications, genetic rearrangements or active mutation. These transformations significantly expand nature's diversity and may profoundly alter our view of DNA's coding potential.

The sequencing of entire genomes, particularly the human genome, has arguably defined our most recent scientific epoch1,2. However, the static picture that has emerged fails to convey the remarkably dynamic nature of DNA. If variety is the spice of life, then the grand challenge ahead for chemical biologists is to decipher how chemical transformation of this genomic information can yield such variety. Just as the approaches of chemical biology have helped to decipher the array of post-translational modifications that expand the functional scope of proteins, similar approaches can now be used to explore the modifications of genomic DNA that promote diversity. This diversity can arise at the level of modifying or mutating individual nucleobases or at the level of recombining larger blocks of DNA. The opportunity for chemistry, then, is to help define these modifications and the mechanisms by which they occur, ultimately allowing us to explore the nature of the dynamic genome.

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Figure 1: The dynamic genome.

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  1. Rahul M. Kohli is in the Division of Infectious Disease in the Department of Medicine, and the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.,

    Rahul M Kohli

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  1. Rahul M Kohli
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Correspondence to Rahul M Kohli.

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Kohli, R. Grand Challenge Commentary: The chemistry of a dynamic genome. Nat Chem Biol 6, 866–868 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio.471

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