Abstract
This Viewpoint brings awareness of the challenges and subsequent breakthroughs at the intersection of different disciplines, illustrated by the example of the influence biological entities exerted on a huge class of inorganic coordination compounds, called polyoxometalates (POMs). We highlight the possible effects of biological systems on POMs that need to be considered, thereby emphasizing the depth and complexity of interdisciplinary work. We map POMs’ structural, electrochemical, and stability properties in the presence of biomolecules and stress the potential challenges related to inorganic coordination chemistry carried out in biological systems. This Viewpoint shows that new chemistry is available at the intersections between disciplines and aims to guide the community toward a discussion about current as well as future trends in truly interdisciplinary work.
Highlights
The division of our knowledge into faculties is done by scientists who are seeking new knowledge often in increasingly highly qualified and specialized scientific disciplines
Multidisciplinarity describes the phenomenon of people from different disciplines working together, each drawing on their own disciplinary knowledge, interdisciplinarity describes the integration of knowledge and methods from different disciplines using a real synthesis of approaches, and transdisciplinarity describes a phenomenon that creates a new unity of intellectual structures beyond the disciplinary perspective.[3]
In the last few decades, we have made important advances in our knowledge of mechanistic biological chemistry and steadily broadened the traditional view of the different roles that metals and their complexes play in biological systems because they are increasingly discussed at various conferences (Metallomics, Metals in Biology, International Conference on Biological Inorganic Chemistry, etc.)
Summary
The division of our knowledge into faculties is done by scientists who are seeking new knowledge often in increasingly highly qualified and specialized scientific disciplines. The inclusion and evaluation of the biological activity of POMs requires in-depth inorganic, biochemical, and biological knowledge In this Viewpoint, we use the application of POMs in biological systems as one example to show that highly interesting, new, and sometimes spectacular findings and applications can be obtained from correctly carried out multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary work. This assumes that researchers contribute more than just their own expertise and are ready for an interdisciplinary discourse, are aware of the challenges connected with interdisciplinary work, and value the gained knowledge highly enough. The following examples are collected from the literature, to which the authors of this Viewpoint contributed
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