Cornell chemists have developed a way to use electrochemistry, a sustainable technique, to make chiral molecules, which occur in mirrored pairs, like human hands. Common in pharmaceuticals, chiral molecules are important to get right to be effective and safe.
"Many drug molecules are chiral - like our hands, they look similar, but one could be very effective in treating a disease while the other could be inactive or even a poison," said Song Lin, the Howard Milstein Faculty Fellow/Tisch University Professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). "A lot of times, making only one of the two mirror image molecules is important in medicinal chemistry."
In some medicines, such as the pain reliever ibuprofen, one side of a chiral molecule is active and effective while the other (called its enantiomer) is present but benign, Lin said. In many other drugs, the active side is mirrored by a toxic enantiomer that must be eliminated, making chiral molecule synthesis an important objective in organic chemistry. Work on asymmetric catalysis - using chiral catalysts in a solution to induce handedness - earned Nobel Prizes in 2001 and 2021.
In "Dynamic Kinetic Resolution of Phosphines with Chiral Supporting Electrolytes," published online in Nature on July 16, Lin, the corresponding author, and collaborators describe how they use electrochemistry to selectively synthesize chiral compounds using the reaction's electrolytes to introduce a chiral environment, a completely new strategy for inducing chirality in electrochemistry.
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.
