Chemical Biology

Chemical biology is a burgeoning field that has rapidly risen to prominence. This surge of interest has been fuelled by chemical biology’s applicability to understanding critical processes in live cells or model organisms in real time. This success has arisen because chemical biology straddles a nexus between chemistry, biology, and physics. Thus, chemical biology can harness rapid chemistry to observe or perturb biological processes, that are in turn reported using physical assays, all in an otherwise unperturbed living entity.

Although its boundaries are endless, the multidisciplinary nature of chemical biology can make the field seem daunting; we beg to differ! Here, we deconstruct chemical biology into its core components, and repackage the material. In the process we build up for each student a practical and theoretical knowledge bank that will set these students on their way to understanding and designing their own chemical biology experiments.

We will discuss fluorescence as a general language used to read out biological phenomena as diverse as protein localization, membrane tension, surface phenomena, and enzyme activity. We will proceed to discuss protein labeling strategies and fusion protein design. Then we will discuss larger and larger scale chemical biology mechanism and screening efforts. Highlights include a large amount of new data, tailored in the lab videos, and a large number of skilled presenters.

Since 2013, the University has been producing "massive open online courses" (MOOCs). These are university-level online courses that are scripted and structured around content, learning activities, interactions and assessments. They are open to everybody, without access-restrictions based on age, profession or level of study.

This initiative aims to make courses from the best universities in the world available to everybody, with monitoring and assessment requirements as high as for regular students. Launched in 2011 by computer science professors at Stanford University, MOOCs now have several hundred million students worldwide. The universities involved in this process include some of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

The University of Geneva’s MOOCs are offered on the Coursera platform .

Les termes utilisés pour désigner des personnes sont pris au sens générique; ils ont à la fois la valeur d’un masculin et d’un féminin.