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I suspect I am the only organic chemist on the forums (who's an active poster) so this might not be easily understood, but I found one of the coolest papers I have read in months yesterday!
Generating carbyne equivalents with photoredox catalysis | Nature
The paper is on carbyne analogs. Simply put, carbynes are thought of as far far too high energy and unstable to be useful, even for simple bond forming events with no regard to stereochemistry. The closest thing to this are carbenes, which are very unique and high energy forms of carbon that act both as nucleophiles and electrophiles at different stages in the reaction, often with good orthogonality. They have immense synthetic utility, and there is a lot of super cool chemistry surrounding them.
This research group in Spain got published in Nature for this work. This is a BIG deal. Nature is regarded as one of the biggest (if not the biggest) general science journal in the world. Publications on stuff like dark matter, search for life on other planets, CRISPR, and other top-tier scientific works get put here, and the standards needed to land a publication here is pretty darn high.
The implications here for further research are huge. Not only has it been shown that it's possible to generate C-centered diazoradical (which is effectively the carbyne), but it can be easily generated from fairly simple bifunctional highly orthogonol reagents. The diversity of possible products, and the easy integregration of carbene chemistry (which occurs following the carbyne mechanistic step) which allows for stereocontrol of the products highlights enormous synthetic utility.
In essence, a whole new class of reactive chemistry has been cracked. This is a once or twice a decade occurrance. I can not wait to see what further research spawns from this!!!
Generating carbyne equivalents with photoredox catalysis | Nature
The paper is on carbyne analogs. Simply put, carbynes are thought of as far far too high energy and unstable to be useful, even for simple bond forming events with no regard to stereochemistry. The closest thing to this are carbenes, which are very unique and high energy forms of carbon that act both as nucleophiles and electrophiles at different stages in the reaction, often with good orthogonality. They have immense synthetic utility, and there is a lot of super cool chemistry surrounding them.
This research group in Spain got published in Nature for this work. This is a BIG deal. Nature is regarded as one of the biggest (if not the biggest) general science journal in the world. Publications on stuff like dark matter, search for life on other planets, CRISPR, and other top-tier scientific works get put here, and the standards needed to land a publication here is pretty darn high.
The implications here for further research are huge. Not only has it been shown that it's possible to generate C-centered diazoradical (which is effectively the carbyne), but it can be easily generated from fairly simple bifunctional highly orthogonol reagents. The diversity of possible products, and the easy integregration of carbene chemistry (which occurs following the carbyne mechanistic step) which allows for stereocontrol of the products highlights enormous synthetic utility.
In essence, a whole new class of reactive chemistry has been cracked. This is a once or twice a decade occurrance. I can not wait to see what further research spawns from this!!!