Imagine a scaffold hopping strategy where you don’t have to re-design your synthetic route for each scaffold. You don’t need Jedi tricks nor power of the dark side to achieve that. This has been addressed for 4-arylpyrimidines in a recent publication by Shun Li et al. published in Nature Communications: “Skeletal editing of 4-arylpyrimidines into…
The microcosmos of biological processes is complex and full of surprises. This is also the case for a new preprint from Richert, Nůsková et al. While developing rabeprazole-thalidomide hybrids as targeted protein degraders, the authors observed rapid, reversible ATP depletion in cells. Surprisingly, this effect was attributed to PROTAC molecules with a certain molecular structure. 𝗠𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗺Mechanistic…
Do you like to Smile? Or perhaps you’re a fan of rearrangement reactions like me? If so, you’ll want to check out this new paper from my former colleague, Srimanta Manna, Ph.D., and his team: “N,N-Disubstituted Anilines Synthesis through Smiles Rearrangement“ 💡 Why it matters:This methodology enables metal-free C–N coupling under mild conditions, and offers…
Recently published paper in Nature Communications claims (as the title says): “General method for carbon–heteroatom cross-coupling reactions via semiheterogeneous red-light metallaphotocatalysis” Quite a bold statement, so let’ take a look at it. Key highlights include: ✅ Red light penetrates 23x deeper than blue light – enabling gram-scale reactions in 10 cm flasks ✅ Four bond…
Forget your fume hood, E. coli just became your new reaction vessel 💡 What’s new?Researchers have shown that a classic organic transformation (the Lossen rearrangement) runs smoothly inside E. coli cells. The reaction uses only phosphate as a catalyst, so no engineered enzyme is needed. By converting a specially activated precursor into para-aminobenzoic acid (PABA), the reaction restores growth to an E. coli strain that cannot…