The upcoming special issue of Accounts of Chemical Research promises to be a good read with several very interesting articles. A couple of my favourites.
One by Baran, which is open access, presents the fruits of his collaborations with various industrial partners, in a symbiotic fashion! Of course he discusses the successful projects he has run together with industrial partners, which does make for very interesting reading, except for the following, which brings back memories: “….both parties agree on some general guidelines, including clearly defined goals and deliverables, biweekly meetings to track research progress, and quarterly or annual meetings to recognize overarching, common objectives”. This is fine except when, like him, you have several partners running simultaneously, means more meetings and reports than chemistry, perhaps? Still you can run a TLC between meetings.
A interesting report by Chang presents her results on the enzymatic fluorination of natural products. Apparently there are fewer than 20 organofluorine natural products known to exist in the big wide world. Also the only characterised soil microbe that does this “chemistry” is Streptomyces cattleya. This bug also produces thienamycin amongst other β-lactams. This account is well worth a read.
Hudlicky immerses us in the history and chemistry of the morphine alkaloids and his efforts, or obsession, as he puts it, to achieve a practical synthesis of this compound class by employing chemoenzymatic methods for the dihydroxylation of aromatic rings. In accordance with the history of this class of compounds Hudlicky traces the “evolution of our approaches to morphine alkaloids and some commercial opiate-derived medicinal agents. The design features and chronology of our approaches are discussed in a way that allows the reader to appreciate a number of errors that were made in conception as well as in execution.” Great stuff.
Finally in this series of accounts appears one by the Stolz group outlining the catalytic enantioselective synthesis of quaternary stereocenters. The preparation of quaternary centers in a defined manner is hard enough but adding the chiral factor increases the difficulty manyfold. Stoltz describes his journey within this chemistry and the resulting account is full of interesting and useful chemistry.
Obviously the accounts I have briefly described are some of my favourites, there are many others equally deserving of mention, but my typing fingers are getting blisters. I do hope the ACS makes this special issue open access but I don’t suppose this will happen. But it should. This is exactly the sort of stuff that all chemists, especially the next generation(s) should be able to read
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