Course Guarantor

Milan Urban

Form of course completion:

Exam

Annotation:

This lecture is focused on chemical reactions in living organisms and on the possibilities how to influence or interfere, monitor or mimic the biological processes. The main focus will be oriented to compounds usable in diagnostics, compounds with potential therapeutic effect whether they currently are or are not being commercially used. Future trends of this field will be discussed.

Content:

• Brief introduction to molecular biology – DNA, RNA, proteins, epigenetics, cell cycle, cell signallization.
• Physical interactions of molecules in living organisms, interaction of substrate-enzyme, ligand-receptor, drug-target, protein-protein interactions, biomembranes etc.
• Design of small molecules that influence the interactions; the relationship between binding energy and activity.
• Design of molecules that mimic nucelic acids, proteins and molecules that have influence on gene expression.
• Basic laboratory techniques used in molecular medicine – isolation, purification, and characterization of nucleic acids and proteins, gene expression analysis, fluorescent reporter assays.
• List of the most commonly used fluorescent molecules used in biological experiments.
• Behavior of xenobiotics in the living organism, adsorption, transport mechanisms, metabolic transformations, excretion.
• Chemical modifications of small molecules that rationally change their behavior in biological system.

Literature:

• Van Vrankern, D.; Weiss, G. Introduction to Bioorganic Chemistry and Chemical Biology. 2013.
• Ondřej Slabý et al. Molekulární medicína, Galén, 2015
• Nelson, D. L., Cox, M. M. Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry 6th edition, Macmillan
• Alberts B., Molecular Biology of Cell, 6th edition, Garland Publishing, 2015.