Photo-controllable bioorthogonal chemistry for spatiotemporal control of bio-targets in living systems
Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 2, 2025
Spatiotemporally Controlled Nuclear Translocation of Guests in Living Cells Using Caged Molecular Glues as Photoactivatable Tags
Published on: January 17, 2019
Jinbo Li1, Hao Kong1, Chenghong Zhu1
1State Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Life Sciences, Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Advanced Organic Materials, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Chemistry and Biomedicine Innovation Center (ChemBIC), Nanjing University Nanjing 210023 China njuzy@nju.edu.cn.
Abstract:
The establishment of bioorthogonal chemistry is one of the most significant advances in chemical biology using exogenous chemistry to perturb and study biological processes. Photo-modulation of biological systems has realized temporal and spatial control on biomacromolecules in living systems. The combination of photo-modulation and bioorthogonal chemistry is therefore emerging as a new direction to develop new chemical biological tools with spatiotemporal resolution. This minireview will focus on recent development of bioorthogonal chemistry subject to spatiotemporal control through photo-irradiation. Different strategies to realize photo-control on bioorthogonal bond-forming reactions and biological applications of photo-controllable bioorthogonal reactions will be summarized to give a perspective on how the innovations on photo-chemistry can contribute to the development of optochemical biology. Future trends to develop more optochemical tools based on novel photochemistry will also be discussed to envision the development of chemistry-oriented optochemical biology.
