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

Any new synthetic methodology, as well as advancing the state of the art, should also consider a few other key criteria, one of which is to build complexity from common feedstock materials- ideally using cheap and environmentally friendly reagents and raw materials. Unactivated (or unsubstituted) olefins, used largely by the polymer industry, represent a rich

My first experiences of radical chlorination where something of a baptism of fire. Generation of chlorine radicals from chlorine gas under intense UV irradiation in a custom-made photochemical flow reactor was as scary as it sounds to a very young, yet to be trained chemistry technician starting out in his carrier in the chemical industry.

Perhaps the most atom economical method for introduction of a carbonyl group into an organic substrate is to use carbon monoxide.1 Millions of tonnes of bulk chemicals are converted to various carbonyl-containing derivatives that are essential commodity products in daily life using this simple C1 unit year on year. Not surprisingly the molecule has a

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Iridium is ubiquitous in organic synthesis. In the last decade alone we have seen its impact as a phtoredox catalyst for a wide range of light-driven reactions that are difficult to achieve using traditional synthetic methods.1 In addition, iridium has rich utility in C-H activation chemistry- a recent review by Cramer highlighting chiral complexes as

Two recent papers in Science have described Iridium catalysed C-H borylation of alkyl C-H bonds. The first paper1 reports a C-H borylation of primary C-H bonds.  Initial experiments showed that dibutyl ether (used as substrate and solvent) could be converted to BuO(CH2)4Bpin and similarly THF could be borylated in the 3-position with 2-methylphenanthroline (2-mphen) as

Three recent papers from the groups of Nagy and Qu have discussed different options for designing and scaling up crystallisation processes to achieve polymorph control and obtain the correct particle size distribution (PSD). The first two papers1,2 describe using PAT (online analysis) with feedback control to design an antisolvent crystallisation process for indomethacin.  Each paper