The Lab Notes

Scientific Update are delighted to sponsor 10 PhD students to attend and present their work at the '7th Winter Process Chemistry Conference' which takes place in Leeds, UK | 8th-9th December 2021. Application Form

In 1981 Oppolzer published a short, racemic synthesis of Lysergic acid. Below is a scheme of the early steps in the synthesis. Can you identify reagents or intermediates G, I and H? Answers and a reference will be posted in late June, along with another problem. Enjoy!  

Last month I posted a scheme from a paper by a team from Merck describing the synthesis of a soluble guanylate cyclase (cGC) stimulator of interest for the treatment of hypertension and asked if you could identify reagents or intermediates B, F, and the target compound H. Below are the answers! You can read more here in…

A recent paper by a team from Merck describe the synthesis of a soluble guanylate cyclase (cGC) stimulator of interest for the treatment of hypertension. Can you identify reagents or intermediates B, F and the target compound H? Answers and a reference will be posted in May, along with another problem. Enjoy!

Last month I posted a scheme from a paper by Jonathan H. George et al at the University of Adelaide describing a biomimetic total synthesis of the Rhododendron meroterpenoids rubiginosins A and G and asked if you could identify reagents or intermediates B, D, E and H. Below are the answers! You can read more here…

Conferences for Industrial Process Chemists and Engineers are continuing ONLINE. As the Covid virus continues to cause travel restrictions, we have persisted to host our popular meetings virtually. We still invite top quality speakers and provide thought provoking programmes aimed at an industrial audience and have developed several new tools to enable us to offer…

Did you know that we have a 'Job Area' on our website? If you have a vacancy and are looking for a process chemist or chemical engineer, why not post your position on our website? We have 1,000's of visitors looking at our site for process chemistry training and events, so thought this is an…

Biocatalysis is becoming ever more popular and prevalent in the synthesis of fine chemicals, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals and is c becoming much more widely used in industrial chemical processes generally, so this review is very timely. The review includes sections on the synthesis of “Alcohols”, “Amines”, “Carbonyls, Carboxylic acids and Derivatives”, “Glycosylation”, “Complex Molecules” and…

I often stumble across interesting chemistry when I peruse my twitter feed. It’s not only rich in new chemistry highlights and ASAP links to journal articles but also chemists sharing their own experiences with both new and existing methodology- good, bad, and sometimes with pictures!- a dimension missing from just reading peer-reviewed journal articles and,…

As with all things in life, necessity is the mother of invention. Synthetic chemistry, as an enabling science, will always rise to the challenge and meet the increasing demand for simpler and more efficient methods to construct fundamentally important structures and functional groups, particularly if these units are conserved privileged pharmacophores imparting biological activity to…