Newsstand Menu

The “click” in click chemistry

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

“Click chemistry” is the term Nobel Prize–winning chemist K. Barry Sharpless coined to describe a particular class of fast, reliable, and green reactions. These reactions allow molecules to click together like LEGO® bricks. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor John E. Moses first studied click chemistry in Sharpless’ lab at Scripps Research. He is the Laboratory’s first professor of chemistry. Moses is using click chemistry to create new molecules, including improved drugs and materials.

Watch Moses, Sharpless, and Joshua Homer, a postdoc in the Moses lab, demonstrate a click reaction, synthesizing a polymer in minutes.

Read the related story: Unstoppable chemistry