Siddhartha Roy - Chemical Biology of the Genome

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We dedicate this book to our parents, who taught us to apply logic and reason and always encouraged and inspired us to go beyond the ordinary to seek the truth.

Siddhartha Roy

Tapas K. Kundu

Interdisciplinary sciences have gradually evolved during the last century. One of the pioneers of interdisciplinary sciences was the physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose, to whom many give credit for the discovery of radio communication. In the first decades of the 20th century, he constructed novel instruments and used techniques borrowed from physics to study electrical activities in plants and many other biological phenomena. Even before that, Chemists, notably Emil Fischer, were using chemical tools to elucidate chemical structures of molecules isolated from biological systems. During the second half of the last century, the use of physical and chemical tools in life sciences became widespread. The importance of chemical tools and concepts in the life sciences became overwhelming in the current century. Chemical Biology is now becoming a pivot around which modern biology is developing.

Since the elucidation of DNA structure and the chemical nature of genes, the genome has emerged as the centerpiece of biological processes and function. It is now clear that many of the most important cellular processes are rooted in the genome. The genome has become the central focus of the study of life sciences. Breakthroughs in microscopy, omics methods, and DNA sequencing have revolutionized the study of the genome. We now realize that the extraordinary complexity of genome function is underlined by physical and chemical principles, although not yet understood in all its intricacies and nuances.

When we planned the book's content, our aim was to emphasize and underline the importance of chemical principles in the functioning of the genome to senior undergraduate or early career graduate students in Life Sciences. Thus we have recapitulated many chemical principles in the early part of the book at the cost of repeating fundamental chemistry. focuses on how these networks of genes function and drugs are being developed to intervene in these gene regulatory networks. As genome function is central to much of biology, much attention is now being given to finding drug targets against aberrant genome processes that lead to diseases, with increasing success. The final chapter is devoted to introducing the readers to this aspect of Chemical Biology.

Our aim was to write a book that would lead the uninitiated readers to a comprehensive understanding of the genome function from a chemical perspective and how a chemical understanding gives us a new platform to improve therapeutic outcomes in many disease processes. Naturally, we could not touch on all the aspects of genome function, and examples were only chosen to illustrate some of the major areas of genome science. We hope that students of life sciences would benefit from this book by nudging them toward a better appreciation of inalienable nature of Chemical Sciences and Living systems.

SR acknowledges Prof. Dhananjay Bhattacharyya, Dr. Krishnananda Chattopadhyay, Dr. Debabrata Biswas, and Dr. Abhishek Mazumder for reading parts of the manuscript and giving helpful feedback. SR acknowledges the support he received from his wife during the writing of this book, without which it would have been challenging to finish it.

TKK acknowledges Ms. Kruthi HT for drawing several figures and editorial assistance. He also acknowledges Dr. Anand P Kulkarni for preparing three figures. Last but not least, TKK acknowledges his students and postdoctoral fellows for their fundamental research contributions, used for writing some part of this book.