Carolyn Bertozzi

Carolyn Bertozzi, who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, conducted her seminal work into bioorthogonal reactions while a professor at UC Berkeley.

“On behalf of the College of Chemistry community, we extend our heartiest congratulations to Carolyn for her spectacular work and this well-deserved honor.” She really changed the way people think about the chemistry that we could do in a living organism.” Much of her research while at Berkeley was done in collaboration with scientists at Berkeley Lab. And the most exciting development is now there’s a pharmaceutical company doing these chemistries inside the body of human cancer patients as a means to deliver drugs to cancers. “Bioorthogonal chemistry was a tool that my lab created originally to study cell surface sugars — in fact, to image cell surface sugars using microscopes,” she said. “But these chemistries make those processes visible, and we have benefited from that — specifically, to study cell surface sugars.” “What that means in practice is that we basically develop pairs of chemical groups, and those pairs of groups are perfectly suited for each other,” she said. Bertozzi’s rationale for developing these reactions was to study the sugars that coat the outside of cells — a field called glycobiology — that has been a passion of hers since her graduate student days at UC Berkeley. “Her lab is among the most prolific in the field, consistently producing innovative and enabling chemical approaches, inspired by organic synthesis, for the study of complex biomolecules in living cells.” “She’s a total rock star, and this is well deserved.” “And when they encounter each other, they want to react and form a bond, and they love each other so much that you can surround those chemical groups with thousands of other chemicals — that’s what you have in biological systems, in your cells, in your body, there’s thousands of chemicals — but these two chemicals that are bioorthogonal will ignore all of that. For 19 years, until 2015 — the year she left to help lead Stanford’s Sarafan ChEM-H institute — she developed the chemical biology techniques for which she received the Nobel Prize.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that HHMI Investigator Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University, Morten Meldal of the University of ...

In 2020, HHMI Investigator [Jennifer Doudna](https://www.hhmi.org/scientists/jennifer-doudna) shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier for [developing a method of genome editing known as CRISPR-Cas9](https://www.hhmi.org/news/jennifer-doudna-awarded-2020-nobel-prize-chemistry). Bertozzi is the eighth woman to be honored with a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Her enthusiasm for research and her talent for communicating science in the classroom has been recognized with multiple teaching awards. In what Bertozzi describes as “probably the biggest scientific shock of my life,” she and her now-former postdoc Ryan Flynn showed that the so-called glycoRNAs poke out from mammalian cells’ outer membrane, where they can interact with other molecules. Barry Sharpless of Scripps Research Institute have received the award for their work on the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. “It was clear that this idea of bioorthogonal chemistry was going to be a major part of the then-nascent field of chemical biology,” he says. In the decades since, chemists have embraced the value of studying biology by total immersion. Bertozzi explores ways to reengineer cell surfaces with the goal of controlling the cells’ interactions. As a Harvard undergrad biology major, Bertozzi discovered the thrill of organic chemistry during her sophomore year. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the news at a press conference earlier today. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that HHMI Investigator Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University, Morten Meldal of University of Copenhagen, and K. Bertozzi has taken click chemistry to a new dimension and started utilizing it in living organisms.

The award recognized Bertozzi's work alongside researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Scripps Research for developing click chemistry and ...

student in her lab, Carolyn has been a long time personal and scientific role model of mine,” Tender said. “Her drive to use chemistry to impact human health inspires all of us.” “Reading widely beyond her field, she saw that one of our enzymes might be a useful reagent,” Long recounted in an email. “But then, he was the chair of the Nobel Committee. “I could not be more delighted that Carolyn Bertozzi has won the Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he told the Stanford News. “Then I have a platform now that I can use to hopefully, you know, keep that trend moving in the right direction.” (Bertozzi said The Globe’s visit in particular was special — she’s from Massachusetts.) There, Long’s lab studied “a bacterial biosynthesis process that involved sulfation while [Bertozzi] analyzed the importance of sulfation on a mammalian cell surface glycan.” Life was “non-stop” after the announcement, Bertozzi said. in chemistry at University of California, Berkeley in 1993 and later attended University of California, San Francisco as a postdoctoral fellow. [won](https://stanforddaily.com/2021/10/12/nobel-prize-in-economics-awarded-to-stanford-professor-guido-imbens/) the economics Nobel in 2021. But the call turned out to be exciting news.

Carolyn R. Bertozzi '88 was one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry ...

Within 10 minutes of the Nobel Committee’s announcement Wednesday morning, a Stanford press group was at Bertozzi’s door, she said. “Playing in that band was really just a highlight of my college years — and getting to play with someone as gifted as Tom was phenomenal.” “Harvard brought me and organic chemistry together.” “So, suddenly, the chair of the Nobel committee is on the phone congratulating me and giving me the news.” Meldal concurrently developed click chemistry and share the prize with Bertozzi. She is also the first alumna of the College to win a Nobel Prize and the eighth woman to win the prize in chemistry.