Inspired by your liver and activated by light, a chemical process developed in labs at Rice University and in China shows promise for drug design and the development of unique materials.
Researchers led by Rice chemist Julian West and Xi-Sheng Wang at the University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, are reporting their successful catalytic process to simultaneously add two distinct functional groups to single alkenes, organic molecules drawn from petrochemicals that contain at least one carbon-carbon double bond combined with hydrogen atoms.
Better yet, they say, is that these alkenes are “unactivated”—that is, they lack reactive atoms near the double bond—and until now, have proven challenging to enhance.
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