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Small Molecule Tools for Cell Biology and Cell Therapy

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Abstract

Up to the present time, bioactive small molecules have had three primary uses: as medicines, agrochemicals, and biological tools. During the past 10 years, our laboratory has been conducting research in tool development, discovering small molecule tools from chemical libraries for exploration of basic cell biology. In the course of this research, our laboratory discovered a wide range of bioactive small molecules and identified their molecular targets. Examples include wrenchnolol (a gene expression modulator that mimics an activation domain of transcription factors) [1, 2], small molecule transcription factor mimics [3, 4], chromeception (an IGF-signaling inhibitor) [5, 6], fatostatins (fat synthesis blockers) [7], and mitochondrial surface indicators [8] (Fig. 1). From these previous studies, we have learned the following three lessons:

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Acknowledgments

This chapter is based on a presentation given at the Uehara Memorial Foundation Symposium: At the Frontier of Chemistry and Biology. I thank my co-workers and collaborators who contributed to the work described in this article. The work was supported in part by the Uehara Memorial Foundation, JST, and JSPS.

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Correspondence to Motonari Uesugi .

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Uesugi, M. (2012). Small Molecule Tools for Cell Biology and Cell Therapy. In: Shibasaki, M., Iino, M., Osada, H. (eds) Chembiomolecular Science. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54038-0_5

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