The Lab Notes

Tert-butyl phenols are important commodity chemicals, with annual production exceeding 120,000 t per annum. They have multiple industrial applications including agrochemicals, antioxidants- in particular 2,6-di-tert-butyl-4- methylphenol (BHT, Figure 1), foods, flavours and fragrances and pharmaceuticals.1 BHT in particular, used as an antioxidant in polymers and oils and prepared by reaction of p-cresol with isobutylene in…

A number of years ago, during a scale-up campaign, I worked to try and convert a relatively simple, high-yielding Suzuki coupling from a relatively standard set of homogeneous coupling conditions to heterogeneous conditions using a palladium on carbon (Pd/C) catalyst. The reason for making the change was that although the homogeneous conditions worked very well,…

The Scientific Update Ltd team recently worked with an amazing group of women to run the first 'Empowering Women In Organic Chemistry Europe' Conference and it was fantastic to read all the positive reviews after the event. It was such an enriching and rewarding day full of positivity. Everyone who participated was totally open and…

A couple of weeks ago I attended the 20th annual Bristol Synthesis Meeting at the Victoria rooms in Bristol, UK.1 Always an excellent event, and this one was no exception. I was intrigued by a presentation given by Franziska Schoenebeck from the University of Aachen, Germany on the application of organogermanes in cross coupling chemistry.…

Biocatalysis has the potential to transform how process chemists make molecules, both in terms of improving existing routes to be more sustainable, and to enable shorter new routes via transformations not feasible using chemical methods. A recent review by a team at Pfizer (S.P. France et. al. JACS Au 2023, 3, 715-735) gives an excellent…

I don’t usually post articles on total synthesis. Their beauty often speaks for itself. However, a recent paper by Zhang and co-workers started me on a trip down memory lane. The paper describes a short, elegant route into the core 1-azabicyclo[4.3.0]nonane structure of the Indolizidine alkaloids (figure 1).1 Together with the structurally related pyrrolizidines (1-azabicyclo[3.3.0]octane),…

The technology-driven world we live in seems to become more complex, more quickly, with every passing day. At a systems level, higher education has responded to the needs of a complex world by promoting specialism, and encouraging deep-dive learning in relatively narrow fields. Specialist expertise is to be valued, but developing the new sustainable processes…

If you are working in industry and are responsible for safety, how do you safely scale up a given chemical reaction? How do you tackle issues like heat transfer, gas release, exposure control, waste stream issues and more? The core of any process safety study is a correct description of both heat and gas release…

Last week I was in Madrid running our chemical development and scale up course. I met a great group of people, one of whom worked at Dynamit Nobel. During a coffee break we struck up a conversation about (of all things) azides, in particular sodium azide. Fairly quickly we both discovered that we had no…

For the past decade I have been intrigued by the emergence of micelle technology and its ability to enable many organic reactions in water, but perplexed about why the reactions work as effectively as they do, and have been waiting for more universal reaction conditions. Two recent papers address these issues. The title of the…