New Method to Create Olefins Found By UChicago Scientists
Most people don’t recognize the olefin molecules, but it is present all around us, like in medicines, bottles, in tires, and in wetsuits. The chemists from the University of Chicago have now discovered a novel method to create a kind of olefin that has four different attachments and that can be used in almost everything from new ways to store data to medicines.
The breakthrough in making these molecules was laid out by the scientists at UChicago, these molecules are called tetra-substituted olefins. Using this new method, they can now precisely and easily select up to four different attachments. Adding to this, the number of steps to make the compounds is cut by their catalysts, for example, from seven to either two or three.
For breakthrough researches related to olefin molecules, there have been at least eight Nobel Prizes. Around the world, millions of these extraordinarily useful molecules are produced every day. They appear in medicines, vitamins, plastic products and more.
But one specific kind of olefin has been tricky to prepare, it has four different attachments with a central unit. Most of the methods are complicated, where a long sequence
is needed to install the partners one by one, making it hard to get each part exactly where we want it to go.The paper’s senior author and a leading organic chemist, Prof. Guangbin Dong says, ” The process is particularly hard for medicinal chemists who want to create new structures in large numbers and use it for studying drugs, and also be able to select where and which structure to attach to, and also to produce them quickly and easily.”
The study team wanted to create a different kind of catalyst. A common olefin, called Norbornene was used. But this Norborene was larger than the usual one, and it had an extra branch attached.
This method is great as it allows four different knobs to attach easily to any different kind. This is mainly useful for researchers who want to discover and design new kinds of molecules which can be useful in medicines and drugs.
“The scope seems to be quite broad as we tested this method on a number of different molecules and they worked on all of them,” said Dong.
At this stage, rather than for manufacturing, this method is majorly useful for discovery, but the research team is happy to have an answer to such a fundamental question.
For a long time, these catalysts systems were known but it was not used successfully for normal olefins said, Dong.
This study included the authors Zhe Dong, PhD’18, now at Princeton University; Jianchun Wang, PhD’19, now at Caltech; and Cheng Yang, a summer undergraduate student from Peking University, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This study was published in Nature Chemistry.
Editor’s Note: A New Method to Create Olefins Discovered. Scientists Find A New Method to Create Olefins.
