Volume 3 Issue 3, March 2007

The broad range of techniques used in chemical biology presents many challenges in reporting, translating and implementing experimental knowledge. By taking advantage of some readily available solutions and instituting some new approaches, it should be possible to more effectively disseminate technological advances.

Chemical and genetic approaches are extensively used to probe living systems at the subcellular level and to advance therapeutic target discovery. The 2006 American Society for Cell Biology meeting highlighted the growing importance of chemical biology approaches in cell biology research.

The zebrafish is a highly promising model system for vertebrate genetics study, but the temporal control of gene expression has remained underdeveloped. A new chemical genetic system using a small-molecule switch for protein synthesis promises to increase the usefulness of the zebrafish as a vertebrate model system.

Short double-stranded RNA duplexes are the triggers for post-transcriptional gene silencing and can also induce epigenetic silencing of genes at the level of transcription. A surprising new finding is that short RNA duplexes targeted to promoter regions can also mediate potent enhancement of transcription.

The presence of 491 very similar protein kinases in humans has proven to be a serious obstacle to generating specific kinase inhibitors and assessing their selectivity. Now, rational drug design has led to the generation of an irreversible kinase inhibitor with built-in features for demonstrating specificity in cells.

The circadian clock runs with a period of about 24 h and therefore allows mammals to predict sunrise at the cellular level. Phosphorylation of the clock protein period 2 influences this process by varying the clock's period length.

Despite having an increasingly accurate parts list for biological cells, much is left to discover about how these parts act together to create functional cells, and how distinct individual cells interact to create functional tissues and organs. Biologists are increasingly aware of the cell-to-cell variability in molecule copy numbers—a trend that is revealed by several new techniques, including one that permits counting molecules in single cells.