Chemical synthesis articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    V-SYNTHES, a scalable and computationally cost-effective synthon-based approach to compound screening, identified compounds with a high affinity for CB2 and CB1 in a hierarchical structure-based screen of more than 11 billion compounds.

    • Arman A. Sadybekov
    • , Anastasiia V. Sadybekov
    •  & Vsevolod Katritch

  • News & Views |

    Benzene rings are almost unbreakable in typical reaction conditions. Chemistry has now been developed that selectively breaks these rings open, highlighting their potential as building blocks for making open-chain molecules.

    • Mark R. Crimmin

  • Article |

    Enantioselective supramolecular recognition allows for the asymmetric synthesis of nitrogen stereocentres, providing chiral ammonium cations in a dynamic crystallization process.

    • Mark P. Walsh
    • , Joseph M. Phelps
    •  & Matthew O. Kitching

  • Article |

    Common aromatic rings, such as anilines, arylboronic acids and aryl halides, can be opened up and converted to alkenyl nitriles through carbon–carbon bond cleavage using a copper catalyst.

    • Xu Qiu
    • , Yueqian Sang
    •  & Ning Jiao

  • News & Views |

    Many scientific fields and industries rely on the synthesis of small organic molecules. A chemical reagent has been developed that allows such molecules to be made by ‘deleting’ nitrogen atoms from readily accessible precursors.

    • William P. Unsworth
    •  & Alyssa-Jennifer Avestro

  • News & Views |

    Magnesium atoms typically lose two electrons to form chemical compounds. A reactive complex has finally been made in which magnesium keeps all of its electrons, and which can be thought of as a soluble form of the metal.

    • Cameron Jones

  • Article |

    Strongly reducing β-diketiminate complexes containing magnesium in its zero oxidation state are reported, among which is a compound with a linear triatomic Mg–Mg–Mg core.

    • B. Rösch
    • , T. X. Gentner
    •  & S. Harder

  • Article |

    Polycarbonates and polyesters with materials properties like those of high-density polyethylene can be recycled chemically by depolymerization to their constituent monomers, re-polymerization yielding material with uncompromised processing and materials properties.

    • Manuel Häußler
    • , Marcel Eck
    •  & Stefan Mecking

  • News & Views |

    An accessible machine-learning tool has been developed that can accelerate the optimization of a wide range of synthetic reactions — and reveals how cognitive bias might have undermined optimization by humans.

    • Jason E. Hein

  • Article |

    Bayesian optimization is applied in chemical synthesis towards the optimization of various organic reactions and is found to outperform scientists in both average optimization efficiency and consistency.

    • Benjamin J. Shields
    • , Jason Stevens
    •  & Abigail G. Doyle

  • Article |

    A synthetic route-planning algorithm, augmented with causal relationships that allow it to strategize over multiple steps, can design complex natural-product syntheses that are indistinguishable from those designed by human experts.

    • Barbara Mikulak-Klucznik
    • , Patrycja Gołębiowska
    •  & Bartosz A. Grzybowski

  • Article |

    Modular synthesis and structural biology are used to design and characterize group A streptogramin antibiotics, one of which has activity against streptogramin-resistant strains and demonstrates efficacy in a mouse model of bacterial infection.

    • Qi Li
    • , Jenna Pellegrino
    •  & Ian B. Seiple

  • News & Views |

    The addition of a methyl group to a drug molecule can greatly alter the drug’s pharmacological properties. A catalyst has been developed that enables this ‘magic methyl effect’ to be rapidly explored for drug discovery.

    • Emily B. Corcoran
    •  & Danielle M. Schultz

  • News & Views |

    An electrically neutral radical has been found to be a potent chemical reducing agent when excited by light. Remarkably, it is produced from a positively charged precursor that has long been used as a strong excited-state oxidizing agent.

    • Radek Cibulka

  • Article |

    An automated synthesis instrument comprising a series of continuous flow modules that are radially arranged around a central switching station can achieve both linear and convergent syntheses.

    • Sourav Chatterjee
    • , Mara Guidi
    •  & Kerry Gilmore

  • Article |

    A manganese-catalysed oxidative C(sp3)–H methylation method allows a methyl group to be selectively installed into medicinally important heterocycles, providing a way to improve pharmaceuticals and better understand the ‘magic methyl effect’.

    • Kaibo Feng
    • , Raundi E. Quevedo
    •  & M. Christina White

  • Article |

    Flash Joule heating of inexpensive carbon sources is used to produce gram-scale quantities of high-quality graphene in under a second, without the need for a furnace, solvents or reactive gases.

    • Duy X. Luong
    • , Ksenia V. Bets
    •  & James M. Tour

  • Article |

    The pore space in the metal–organic framework Zr6O4(OH)4(bpydc)6 can be used as a scaffold to grow precisely defined atomically thick sheets of metal halide materials, taking advantage of multiple binding sites to direct complexation of the metal ions; these metal halide nanosheets fill the size gap between discrete molecular magnets and bulk magnetic materials, with potentially unusual magnetic properties arising from this size regime.

    • Miguel I. Gonzalez
    • , Ari B. Turkiewicz
    •  & Jeffrey R. Long

  • News & Views |

    Operationally simple chemical reactions, termed click reactions, are widely used in many scientific fields. A streamlined synthesis of compounds called azides looks set to expand the role of click chemistry still further.

    • Joseph J. Topczewski
    •  & En-Chih Liu

  • Article |

    A method for the site-selective C–H borylation of arenes and heteroarenes is described, in which BBr3 acts as both a reagent and a catalyst.

    • Jiahang Lv
    • , Xiangyang Chen
    •  & Zhuangzhi Shi

  • Letter |

    Human scientists make unrepresentative chemical reagent and reaction condition choices, and machine-learning algorithms trained on human-selected experiments are less capable of successfully predicting reaction outcomes than those trained on randomly generated experiments.

    • Xiwen Jia
    • , Allyson Lynch
    •  & Joshua Schrier

  • News & Views |

    Computational models that predict the selectivity of reactions are typically accurate for only a specific reaction type and a narrow range of reaction components. A more general model has now been reported.

    • Per-Ola Norrby

  • Perspective |

    This Perspective discusses the challenges associated with the prediction of chemical synthesis, in particular the reaction conditions required for organic transformations, and the role of machine-learning approaches in the prediction process.

    • Ian W. Davies

  • News & Views |

    Failed chemical reactions are often not reported, which means that vast amounts of potentially useful data are going to waste. Experiments show that machine learning can use such data to optimize the preparation of porous materials.

    • Seth Cohen

  • Letter |

    The silver-mediated deconstructive functionalization of saturated nitrogen heterocycles via acylic haloamine intermediates provides access to various acyclic amines as well as enabling ring contraction and skeletal remodelling.

    • Jose B. Roque
    • , Yusuke Kuroda
    •  & Richmond Sarpong

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