The future of click chemistry

It has been almost a quarter-century since K. Barry Sharpless, M.G. Finn, and Hartmuth C. Kolb published the paper that some refer to as the click manifesto . In it, the researchers presented a vision for synthetic chemistry that prioritizes quick and easy access to functional molecules. Today, click reactions can be found nearly everywhere organic bonds come in handy. They even garnered Sharpless, Carolyn Bertozzi, and Morten Meldal the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2022 . "It's been fun to watch things progress over the years" as more reactions, tools, and applications grow out of click chemistry, Jennifer Prescher says. As a graduate student, Prescher worked on bioorthogonal click chemistry with Bertozzi in the early days of the field. She now runs a lab at the University of California, Irvine, researching chemical probes for cellular communication. With about 1,700 new publications on the subject added to the SciFinder database