This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Much of organic chemistry, including the type used to create and alter medicinal drugs, relies on modifying carbon bonds. Rice University's Julian West has been developing a less expensive, faster and more environmentally friendly way to catalyze these reactions, with a breakthrough published in the journal Nature Catalysis.
"Our work is essentially that of molecular architects. In my lab, we are particularly interested in using inexpensive and easily available building blocks to build and modify organic compounds," said West, an assistant professor of chemistry and corresponding author of the study. "Now, we've adapted our cheap and environmentally friendly method to precisely and specifically bind a carbon to other carbons, an essential reaction for making organic molecules." West's team uses iron, sulfur and purple light to add new elements to alkenes, or places where one carbon was double-bonded to another carbon.
Until now, however, this approach was limited to adding building blocks containing highly reactive elements like fluorine. Fluorine is a greedy element. When it's bound to other elements like carbon, it hogs all the shared electrons, giving itself a partial negative charge.
West's team has previously used this negative charge to make carbon bonds with their iron, sulfur and purple light method. This means they can start with a fluorine-carbon compound and attach it to the carbon-carbon double bond of their choice. While useful for greedy elements like fluorine and chlorine, this approach didn't allow them to manipulate carbon, which is very good at sharing electrons.
Carbon's selflessness—it either donates shared electrons to a greedy molecule like fluorine or shares them quite nicely with other selfless elements—makes it very stable and thus difficult to add to a simple carbon-carbon double bond. This is a problem for molecular architects like West. Much of organic chemistry is just chains of carbon bound to other carbons, or carbons bonded to carbon and another element.
Being able to add carbons to other carbons, especially to carbon-carbon double bonds, is critical for building useful organic molecules. Typically, this problem is solved by using rare-earth metals like palladium, an environmentally and financially costly approach. West's team wanted to use their iron, sulfur and light system to place a carbon on a carbon-carbon double bond.
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