Topic
Chemical routes aiming to replace high-energy, complex catalytic industrial processes with ambient-condition alternatives.
Two IPC PAS studies used light-activated catalysts and ultrasound to make drug-research compounds at 54% and over 97% selectivity. Both are laboratory proofs of concept, and the diapocynin route's yield was 33%.
Reality
University of Limerick researchers made carbon nanofibers for sodium-ion batteries from lignosulfonate, a pulp-and-paper waste, in a water-based process. The team says the process also does without the synthetic binders and additives common in battery manufacturing.
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Seoul National University researchers raised the desired product share from about 16% to 97% by controlling acidity near electrodes. The route uses oxygen and electricity instead of added peroxides, and the figures come from the university's own summary.
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Researchers engineered Escherichia coli with up to 15 nitroreductase gene deletions that let the cells retain nitroaromatic compounds normal strains destroy. Industry makes these chemicals with nitric acid under heat and hazard that a cell-based route avoids.
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Yokohama National University chemists converted pyridine to piperidine at over 99% yield with a cobalt catalyst kept between metal and oxide. That state drifts during electrolysis, so the balance depends on how the cell is run as well as on how the catalyst is made.
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Chonnam National University chemists used dichloromethane as an amide coupling reagent, making more than 20 grams of the drug moclobemide at over 99% purity. The open test is whether using up a chlorinated solvent as a reagent leaves less waste than the coupling reagents it would replace.
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Julian West's lab reports in Nature Catalysis that a pair of carboxylic acids, plus iron, sulfur and a change of light color, adds a carbon fragment across an alkene double bond, a job usually given to palladium.
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The Argonne-led hybrid pairs a cheap semiconductor with a light-absorbing membrane from salt-loving microbes, and out-produced the semiconductor alone by more than five times.
Reality