Chemical genetics future developments

Genetically designed enzymes, cells and organisms will produce or modify chemicals in a way that even today is unimaginable. We caimot be sure about how things will be in ten years time, but one thing is certain imagination will be a key driver of the future. Companies with a vision and the aspiration to achieve it will then drive the speed of development For example, the chemical industry only developed environmentally advanced processes when it inspired this move itself, after major incidents of pollution. 

While the number of enzymes, genes, and nucleotides listed in the Index is fewer than 500, their known number, as noted in Chapter 21, exceeds many thousands. The paltry number of enzymes, genes, and nucleotides listed in Chapter 21, Table XXI-2 was never intended to represent the total biological agents operating in the plant. Those selected for inclusion were from texts, research manuscripts, and patents where active research was conducted in the past in attempts to better understand the physiology and biochemistry of tobacco. As future genetic research develops, it is envisioned that the identity and function of hundreds of thousands of additional chemicals will be published. 

The future utility of chemical genetics will depend upon access to libraries. Most current collections of diverse molecules are privately owned and unlikely ever to be widely available. Thus the future of this field probably lies in the hands of the synthetic chemists, hanging on their willingness to participate more deeply in interdisciplinary projects and develop custom libraries at affordable prices. 

As forward chemical genetic screens are commonly performed in the context of a human disease hypothesis, a blurred line between probe development and drug discovery can potentially create incentives to limit the use of discovered compounds through patent protection. While the intent of chemical biology is not to stifle therapeutic development but conversely to enable future... 

Fig. 6.1. This is a structure-based proposal as to how the genetic code might have developed. It is hypothesized that the future coding region is in contact with the amino acids during the binding phase and folds away to interact specifically with the future tRNA. This may be a simplistic way to look at this problem but it emphasizes that there was a chemical selection process involved based on structure-function concepts in chemistry that lead to the genetic code. Thus, this figure is intended to emphasize a principle rather than the process of which details are still subject to intense research.

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