Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 | What is ‘asymmetric organocatalysis’, this year’s award-winning discovery

The German Benjamin List and the American David MacMillan have won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a new precise tool for molecular construction: organocatalysis.

According to the ruling of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, this technique has had a great impact on pharmaceutical research and has made chemistry more environmentally friendly.

Many research areas and industries depend on the ability to form durable, elastic materials, store energy in batteries, or inhibit the progression of disease. This work requires catalysts, which are substances that control and accelerate chemical reactions, without becoming part of the final product.

For example, catalytic converters in cars transform toxic substances in exhaust gases into harmless molecules. in the form of enzymes, which carve out the molecules necessary for life.

Therefore, catalysts are fundamental tools for chemists, but researchers have long believed that there were only two types of catalysts available in principle:

In 2000, Benjamin List (director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung, specializing in chemical research on catalysis) and David MacMillan (professor at Princeton), independently of each other, developed and relies on small organic molecules.

“This concept of catalysis is as simple as it is ingenious, and the fact is that many people have wondered why we did not think about it before”Johan Aqvist, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, says in a statement.

Organic catalysts have a stable framework of carbon atoms, to which more active chemical groups can be attached. These often contain. This means that these catalysts are both environmentally friendly and inexpensive to produce.

The rapid expansion in the use of organic catalysts is mainly due to their ability to drive asymmetric catalysis. When building molecules, situations often occur where two different molecules can form, which, like our hands, are Chemists will often only want one of these, particularly when producing pharmaceuticals.

Organocatalysis has developed at an astonishing speed since 2000, and they have shown that organic catalysts can be used to drive a multitude of chemical reactions.

Using these reactions, researchers can now more efficiently build anything from new pharmaceuticals to molecules that can capture light in solar cells. In this way, according to the statement from the Swedish Academy.

Amino acids and organic molecules

Benjamin List worked before 2000 with catalytic antibodies, redesigned to produce chemical reactions, and wondered if it was necessary for amino acids to be part of an enzyme for, or another simple molecule, could do the same task.

So he decided to test whether proline, one of the amino acids that make up the proteins of living beings, could catalyze an aldol reaction, which joins carbon atoms of different molecules.

List showed that proline was not only an efficient catalyst, but that it could also be simpler, cheaper and more environmentally friendly than metals and enzymes, and published his results in 2000.

During the days when List was conducting these experiments, David MacMillan was working on improving asymmetric catalysis but using metals, an idea that he eventually scrapped to focus on designing simple organic molecules.

MacMillan thought that if he wanted them to catalyze a reaction, they had to form an iminium ion, which contains a nitrogen atom, with an inherent affinity for electrons – in this way, and he found that they worked efficiently.

The British researcher also came up with the term for the new concept of catalysis, organocatalysis, a field that has developed rapidly since then and that both List and MacMillan continue to lead.

List (Frankfurt, Germany, 1968) received his doctorate from Goethe University in 1997 and directs the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research. MacMillan (Bellshill, United Kingdom, 1968) received his doctorate from the University of California and today teaches at Princeton, both from the United States.

The winners happen in the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to the French Emmanuelle Charpentier and the American Jennifer Doudna, awarded last year for the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 genetic scissors, a method for gene editing.

Agencies

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