Dept of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and the Dept of Pharmacology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8103, USA. craig.crews@yale.edu
The new field of chemical biology brings together chemists and biologists who are seeking to understand and mimic the natural world. One research strategy in this new field is the development of biologically active small molecules as molecular probes. This approach, which has been called 'chemical' genetics, has allowed elucidation of several pathways that have been difficult to study using traditional genetic approaches.