Chemistry shaping biology

I ll save you the trouble of skipping ahead to where the data are described. R. J. P. Williams was right. The chemical trends he identified are reflected in the genomic data, with a few exceptions, and he predicted it all from chemical rules like the Irving-Williams series. This means that, over 4 billion years, chemistry shaped biology. It also contradicts Wonderful Life. Stephen Jay Gould s tape of life would look much the same upon replay, because its events, when examined from the proper perspective, were shaped by universal and predictable chemical laws. 

Chemistry shaped biology as chemical changes paved the way for biological changes. All metals were not available at all times, and some useful metals were locked away, stuck in geological dead ends when the planet first formed. On the day... 

S. Hyde, S. Andersson, K. Larsson, Z. Blum, T. Landh, S. Lidin, and B. W. Ninham. The Language of Shape, the Role of Curvature in Condensed Matter Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, 1997. 

R.J. Goldacre, Surface films, their collapse on compression, the shapes and sizes of cells and the origin of life, in J.F. Danielli, K.G.A. Pankhurst and A.C. Riddiford (Eds.), Surface Phenomena in Chemistry and Biology, Pergamon, New York, 1958, pp. 278-298. 

We wished to develop a macroscopic model of the interactions between molecular ligands and receptors. Molecular recognition is a broad subject that describes selective assembly in chemistry and biology, with examples from DNA-protein complex formation to asymmetric catalysis. The principle behind molecular recognition dictates that the molecules that mate have complementary shapes and interfacial characteristics. Our extension of this principle to the mesoscale involved the self-assembly of objects that matched both... 

Albanese A, Tang PS, Chan WCW (2012) The effect of nanoparticle size, shape, and surface chemistry on biological systems. Annu Rev Biomed Eng 14( 1 ) 1—16... 

Chen, P., del Rio, O.I. and Neumann, A.W. (2000) Axisymmetric drop shape analysis, in Physical Chemistry of Biological Interfaces. Marcel Dekker, New York... 

The pr e-Woodwardhn era largely concerned itself with the collection and classification of synthetic tools chemical reactions suited to broad application to the constitutional construction of molecular skeletons (including Kiliani s chain-extension of aldoses, reactions of the aldol type, and cycloadditions of the Diels-Alder type). The pre- Woodwardian era is dominated by two synthetic chemists Emil Fischer and Robert Robinson. Emil Fischer was emphasizing the importance of synthetic chemistry in biology as early as 1907 [30]. He was probably the first to make productive use of the three-dimensional structures of organic molecules, in the interpretation of isomerism phenomena in carbohydrates with the aid of the Van t Hoff and Le Bel tetrahedron model (cf. family tree of aldoses in Scheme 1-6), and in the explanation of the action of an enzyme on a substrate, which assumes that the complementarily fitting surfaces of the mutually dependent partners are noncovalently bound for a little while to one another (shape complementarity) [31],... 

The development and application of molecular shape descriptors is an active area in computational chemistry and biology. The main goal of our work is to develop mathematical descriptors that can determine whether two molecules have comparable shapes. In this chapter we present a series of molecular shape descriptors developed oti the basis of molecular vdW space. The molecules are treated in the hard sphere approximation, as a body composed from a collection of atomic fused spheres. Each sphere is centered in the corresponding nucleus and it is characterized by its Cartesian coordinates and by its vdW radius, r. These molecular vdW shape descriptors depend only on the internal structure of the molecule, being invariants to any translation and rotation movement. Consequently, they may inform us that two molecules have comparable shapes, but since they carry no information about the absolute orientation or position of the molecule, they are not useful for computing molecular superposition. 

As seen from the above discussion, DBAs continue to attract a great deal of interest in aromatic chemistry. This is because their characteristic structural and electronic properties, that is, relatively high reactivity, shape persistency, and facile structural and functional modifications, invoked new fields of chemistry, as exemplified above in their use in optoelectronic materials, supramolecular chemistry, and biological applications. The renaissance of DBAs is hkely to continue for decades to come. 

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