FCOK?

The company FCUK made a name by a clever juxtaposition of letters. To organic chemists, however, FC means Friedel-Crafts, a reaction still practised extensively, despite poor Green Chemistry credentials and it is still an excellent method of making aromatic ketones. Now a variation on the FC reaction has been reported. A recent paper from a Japanese group in Hiroshima (Yoshida H et al, Chem Commun, 2007, 2405-2407) has shown that acyl chlorides can react with benzynes (arynes) to give the useful ortho-substituted ketone.
• Trevor Laird

A Pressure-Dependent Asymmetic Catalytic Hydrogenation of an Unsaturated Acids

A full paper has appeared which describes in detail the mechanism of enantioselective catalytic hydrogenation of a complex unsaturated carboxylic acid, the last step in the synthesis of a prostaglandin D2 receptor antagonist. (D M Tellers et al, J Am Chem Soc., 2006, 128, 17063-17073).

From a scale up point of view, the first problem to solve was the low solubility of the unsaturated acid in most solvents. Normally this has been solved by using the triethylamine salt, but in this case the solubility was still low. View the complete tip and diagram here>

 

Solvent Effects and Effect of Additives in the Asymmetric Reduction of a Key Statin Intermediate

nitial studies on the selective asymmetric hydrogenation of the carbonyl group of a key statin intermediate were complicated by byproduct formation. It was eventually realized that the ruthenium BINAP catalysts have acidic properties which cause reactions with solvents (eg methanol and ethyl acetate) to occur. View the complete tip and diagram here>

How to Tantalise Your Reactions?

When secondary and tertiary amines are made by alkylation, the halide waste leads to poor atom economy; reductive alkylation using aldehydes and ketones is usually a more attractive method, both from a selectivity and atom economy viewpoint. more>

Microwave Heating as a Tool for Process Chemists

Microwave heating is now established as an important tool for synthetic chemists. This new course will give participants an overview and understanding of the technique, and of the equipment available, and will give them an insight into how to generate robust syntheses for scale up using microwave heating. more>

Organic Process Research & Development - Jersey 2007

Scientific Update’s recent ‘OPRD’ Conference in Jersey was full of excellent presentations. For the first time, some of these were videoed for the first time, so that non-participants could view the lecture on the web. John Knight of Evotec spoke about a joint project with Achillion Pharmaceuticals involving the multi-kilo preparation of a thymidine analogue ACH-126443. View the video here>

The Top Ten Most-Cited Articles in OPRD Journal!

To celebrate the publication of OPR&D’s 10th volume, the ACS are listing the Journal’s top articles from the past 10 years.

Subscribers can view the full text
of these articles. ACS Publications offers free access to the abstracts and all articles published in ACS Web Editions as well as the Archives. Non-subscribers can view the abstracts or purchase the articles.

View the Top 10 with links here>

• Trevor Laird

The extreme diet coke & mentos experiments: What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It’s amazing and completely insane – see all the experiments and discover the chemistry behind this phenomenon.

www.eepybird.com

 

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