A recent paper from a Dutch team brings together two items that have fascinated me since graduate school in a way that comes in the category of “I can’t believe nobody thought of that before!” (Chem. Commun., 2023, 59, 3838) The ability to upgrade the enantiomeric excess of a solid by recrystallization The use of

One of my recent bugaboos has been the increase in the number of papers claiming a “green” synthesis, reagent, process or solvent. It seems that I am not alone in my concerns of the misuse of words such as “green” and “sustainable” based on a recent paper called ‘What does it mean that “something is

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,

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

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

Two principles that we at Scientific Update teach in the foundational “Chemical Development” course are that new experimental methods can open new opportunities for old reactions, and that as scientists we should be looking to understand the mechanisms of empirical observations. Both of these principles are exemplified in by a recent pre-print publication by the

“How many steps are there in a synthetic route?” is one of the foundational questions for any chemist, but as with many apparently simple questions, the answer isn’t always that simple. In many cases chemists are incentivized to give an artificially low step count because it makes their new route look better and therefore more

Finding generally applicable, more sustainable, scalable methods to construct C-C bonds via cross-coupling is likely to be one of the major challenges that process chemists will face over the next decade. At the moment chemists overwhelmingly rely on pre-formed nucleophilic organometallics (such as Grignard, organozinc and organoboron reagents) in C-C couplings with an electrophile (such

Acquisition and processing of analytical HPLC data is often the main bottleneck when performing automated data-rich or high-throughput experimentation. Even though it was over 20 years ago, I well remember spending most of each day running, processing and compiling HPLC data when using an automated reaction platform to run 4 data-rich time course experiments in