Editorial: Specialty grand challenge: Structure, spectroscopy, and imaging

Abstract

In the interdisciplinary field of chemical biology, different scientists, generally chemists and biologists, undertake their best efforts to develop advanced methodologies and innovative approaches to address important scientific goals and societal demands. Furthermore, confronting the complexity of problems to be solved and sophisticated systems to be discerned, the partnership of diverse other specialists is demanded, including physicists, spectroscopists, pharmacologists, and physicians. Collectively, their complemented work brings together several areas of research, experimental as well as theoretical, to accomplish higher levels of knowledge about the structural and functional characterization of biological systems. A profound understanding of life and its wide-ranging processes are their final aims. Recently, AlphaFold, a revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) network, predicted the structures of more than 200 million proteins in a universe of 1 million species, reaching to determine the protein structures of nearly every organism with known protein sequence data. It made it possible to understand the relationships between protein functions and its 3D structures, and the results are now available to scientists in a database (Callaway, 2022). These data can certainly encourage numerous types of studies in the future. A significant example of the structural feature’s importance in basic and applied investigations is the development of messenger RNA (mRNA)-based therapeutics (Dammes and Peer, 2020). Since its discovery in the 1960s, improvements in its engineering to express therapeutic proteins or manipulate specific genes’ expression have enabled a broad range of applications in intractable diseases, such as severe infections, varied forms of cancer, and genetic diseases, besides new vaccines, and accelerate its clinical translation (Kim, 2022; Qin, Tang, Chen et al., 2022). Because of the unfavorable characteristics of mRNA’s, such as large size, instability, immunogenicity, sensitivity to enzymatic degradation by RNases, and limited cellular uptake, many pivotal issues had to be solved during the development of mRNA-based therapeutics. Additionally, a variety of delivery strategies, including nanolipids, exosomes, or polymeric micelles as carriers, was crucial for their wide applicability (Uchida et al., 2020). Moreover, investigations in this chemico–biological field frequently lead to the conception, design, and provision of new molecules capable of interacting efficiently with selected biomolecules, and consequently causing remarkable modifications in their functional behavior. Results can establish new parameters and lead to new drugs that are more efficient, safe, and selective in facing illnesses and syndromes. Significant examples are found in the literature, illustrating important and innovative chemical–biological studies. They include small peptides and large protein effects in Alzheimer’s disease (Picone et al., 2022), emergence of bimolecular condensates as attractive targets for drug discovery (Mitrea OPEN ACCESS