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In vivo !
But what are you doing here, sleeping little baby, inside the multimedia site of the CNRS Institute of Chemistry ? If there is a boundary between the mineral world and the living world, chemistry has nothing to do with it ! As you walk inside this house, you will certainly discover many objects made in factories using the processes developed by chemists, but inside our baby, countless chemical reactions are taking place every second : from its stomach where large food molecules are broken down into elementary constituents, to its brain where thousands of chemical messengers interconnect its neurons of future scientist !
Yet life, exceptional chemist, has developed extraordinary strategies to establish its reactions without needing the baby to be heated or agitated : it uses remarkable catalysts : enzymes, proteins which chemists in laboratories are also looking to emulate.
The more chemists have been able to study and manipulate large molecules, the finer the limit with biology has become. Today, molecular biologists consider living matter from the point of view of the chemist. At the outset of every biological process, there are molecules and reactions. Molecules as information medium : DNA, molecules able to catalyse chemical reactions thanks to their appropriate form : proteins, molecules that attach themselves onto the cells to deliver their message : hormones… for more than three and a half billion years, life has continually been inventing an elaborate chemistry that scientists are slowly beginning to understand…
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