International Symposium On Bioorganic Chemistry

Bioorganic chemistry is a field undergoing explosive growth, or rather, it is a set of expanding fields. Natural product chemistry, an area of classic concern, has new targets and new methods; it now addresses many of the detailed questions about metabolism formerly reserved to biochemistry. Meanwhile, new techniques permit chemists to perform the kinds of detailed studies on large biomolecules-proteins and nucleic acids-that were previously possible only on small molecules. Structure-reactivity relationships and reaction mechanisms can be studied in enzymes. Finally, our increased understanding of enzyme mechanisms has stimulated the growth of the field of biomimetic chemistry, in which new molecules are designed and synthesized with the aim of initiating enzymatic processes. Presentations pertained to the following categories: Mimics of Biological Systems; Chemistry of Natural Products of Biological Importance; Chemistry of Biological Macromolecules.

Frontiers of Bioorganic Chemistry and Molecular Biology covers the proceedings of the International Symposium on Frontiers of Bioorganic Chemistry and Molecular Biology, held in Moscow and Tashkent, USSR on September 25-October 2, 1978. This symposium is devoted to a discussion of the physico-chemical basis of life processes. This book contains 56 chapters, and reflects the results in the study of peptides and proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and other biopolymers. Other chapters deal with the study of low molecular regulators, including steroids, alkaloids, and antibiotics. This book also includes discussion of the achievements in the study of genetic structures and of cellular protein synthesizing systems of the molecular basis of enzymic catalysis and of bioenergetic processes. This book will be of value to biochemists and molecular biologists.

The organic chemist is rarely satisfied by a simple "explanation" of the reactivity of organic molecules. Rather, the chemist wants to go one step further, to "control" the behavior of molecules by altering their structure in a controlled way. This is, in fact, a rather stringent definition of "understanding," as it requires the "prediction" of behavior from structure (or structure from behavior). But it also places technical demands on the chemist. He must be able to synthesize the molecules he studies, characterize them at the atomic level of structural resolution, and then measure their behaviors to the precision that his explanation demands. Biological chemistry presents special problems in this regard. Although the tools for synthesis, purification, and structural characterization are now available for manipulating rather large biological macromolecules (proteins and nucleic acids in particular), the theory supporting these manipulations is inadequate. We certainly do not know enough to control generally the behavior of biological macromolecules; still worse, it is not clear that we know enough to design synthetic molecules to expand our understanding about how reactivity in such biological macromolecules might be controlled. Starting from scratch, there are simply too many oligopeptides to make; starting from native proteins, there are simply too many structural mutations that might be introduced.