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SymposiumQuo Vadis: The Boundless Trajectories of Chemical Biology Jeremy M. Baskin*,†,‡ and Yimon Aye*,†,§ †Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, United States ‡Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, United States Department of Biochemistry, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, New York 10065, United States C University’s Baker Lectures are the oldest continuous lecture series presented by a Chemistry Department at an American university. Established in 1923 and endowed by the banker and philanthropist George Fisher Baker, these lectures have historically provided opportunities for prominent chemists to spend mini-sabbaticals at Cornell’s Ithaca campus. In fact, 21 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Baker Lecturers, and in most cases the Baker Lecture preceded the Nobel Prize. Notable among Baker lectures is the series presented in 1939 by Linus Pauling, the product of which was his seminal book The Nature of the Chemical Bond, published by the Cornell University Press. In recent years, the Baker Lectures have adopted a different format, wherein several luminaries are welcomed to Ithaca to present seminars in a one-day symposium on a specific theme. The focus of the symposium rotates through the different subfields of chemistry, with chemical biology occurring only once every six or seven years. On April 8, 2017, five outstanding chemical biologists traveled to Cornell’s campus to present keynote lectures in a symposium titled “Quo Vadis: The Boundless Trajectories of Chemical Biology.” The invited speakers included Christopher J. Chang (University of California Berkeley), Jon Clardy (Harvard Medical School), Laura L. Kiessling (University of WisconsinMadison/Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Alanna Schepartz (Yale University), and David A. Tirrell (California Institute of Technology), see Figure 1. In a first, this year we were enabled to extend invitations beyond the Cornell community to several local institutions due to generous sponsorship from ACS Central Science, ACS Chemical Biology, and Biochemistry that supplemented funds from the Baker Endowment. Thus, we were pleased to welcome attendees from several schools from upstate New York, including the Hobart and Williams Smith Colleges, SUNY Albany, SUNY Binghamton, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, SUNY Cortland, Syracuse University, University of Rochester, and Wells College. Set in Cornell’s historic Baker 200 lecture hall, the attendees were treated to a day of outstanding lectures that collectively illuminated us all on quo vadis, or “where are you going,” in chemical biology. Collectively, the talks touched on many diverse groups of biological molecules, from ions and reactive oxygen species to secondary metabolites, lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins: how and where they are being made, what they are doing, and how we can monitor and manipulate them. Jon Clardy (Harvard Medical School) kicked off the day with a seminar titled “Molecular View of Multilateral Symbioses.” He began by describing how we as humans share one important characteristic with ants, termites, and beetles: we all practice agriculture, a specialized form of symbiosis. Fungi are the crops that these insects culture, and the collective encompassing the insects, commensal and pathogenic fungi, and bacteria represents a rich ecosystem to mine for new chemotypes. A major focus of the seminar was the varying genetic contexts in which secondary metabolite biosynthetic clusters reside, and that chemical diversity within metabolite families is facilitated by the evolutionary transfer of their biosynthetic genes from a bacterial plasmid to the chromosome. These elusive compounds have been termed cryptic metabolites, which Professor Clardy suggested are so-named to “remove any sense of guilt about not finding them.” As an example of these themes, he described his group’s recent work to elucidate the identity and biosynthesis of 9-methoxyrebeccamycin, an analog of the antitumor agent rebeccamycin. This “bacterial Game of Thrones,” he described, with “names you can’t pronounce trying to take each other over,” can provide outstanding starting points for therapeutic agents to treat emerging infectious disease. Such therapeutic agents represent a Figure 1. External speakers for the 2017 Baker Symposium in Chemical Biology. From left: Professors David Tirrell, Jon Clardy, Laura Kiessling, Alanna Schepartz, and Christopher Chang. Photo credit: Jessica Daughtry (Cornell University). In Focus