By IANS,
Washington : Add light to an ordinary chemical reaction being helped by a catalyst and hey presto, you have a new compound. Princeton University scientists are harnessing the potential of light bulbs, effectively using two catalysts to help create materials from new kinds of chemical reactions.
The research is being conducted by David MacMillan, professor of organic chemistry at Princeton University and David Nicewicz, a postdoctoral fellow.
The method involves using a light bulb to catalyse or propel a reaction in a flask of fluid containing two different classes of chemicals. Chemicals in the container start to selectively react with one another when exposed to the light.
“This is the first time that chemists have realised the potential to use simple light bulbs – or weak light – to catalytically propel organic chemical reactions, as extremely simple as it sounds,” MacMillan said.
The work appeared in a special online edition of Science Thursday.
The method brings together two different fields of chemistry – organic catalysis and inorganic photoredox catalysis and combining two different compounds and two different catalysts.
“There are two interwoven catalytic cycles where everything is happening at just the right time,” MacMillan said. “It’s like an orchestra with the perfect conductor.” Experts agreed that the discovery points to exciting possibilities.
“It will provide access to a variety of interesting compounds currently unavailable due to the new bond connections that it enables,” said Stephen Buchwald, professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“This method as well as the basic concepts enunciated in the paper are sure to be of great importance, both in academia and in pharmaceutical and other industries,” he said.
“What MacMillan has succeeded in doing is to effect a challenging transformation with an efficient, versatile, mild and environmentally benign process,” said John Schwab, at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.
“It’s also a beautiful example of taking lessons from nature and applying them to great practical advantage in a non-natural setting,” he added.
A catalyst is a substance that speeds up the chemical reaction without being changed itself. Ten years ago, MacMillan led a team that created a new way of instigating chemical reactions – a new form of catalysis called organocatalysis.
Instead of using metals to propel a chemical reaction, the team developed a way to use organic chemicals such as carbon in the reaction, an environmentally safer, easier and cheaper way to produce drugs.
In most cases, the chemical process that creates drugs produces two forms of it, the desired one and a ‘mirror’ image compound.
Because this ‘mirror image’ can often cause untoward side effects, MacMillian’s method gave them a cheaper and safer alternative that is now becoming more globally adopted.