Project description:A perspective on the development of mechanistic carbene chemistry is presented. The author will point out questions that have been answered, and a next generation of questions will be proposed.
Project description:Bora-fluoresceins (BFs), fluorescein analogues containing a tricoordinate boron atom instead of an oxygen atom at the 10-position of the fluorescein skeleton, were synthesized as a new family of fluorescein analogues. The deprotonated BFs exhibited absorption and fluorescence in the near-infrared region, which were significantly red-shifted relative to those of hitherto-known heteroatom-substituted fluorescein analogues on account of the orbital interaction between the tricoordinate boron atom and the fluorescein skeleton. BFs also showed multi-stage changes resulting from a Lewis acid-base equilibrium at the boron center in combination with a Brønsted acid-base equilibrium at the phenolic hydroxy group.
Project description:The recently proved one-to-one structural equivalence between a conjugated hydrocarbon CnHm and the corresponding borane BnHm+n is applied here to hybrid systems, where each C=C double bond in the hydrocarbon is consecutively substituted by planar B(H2)B moieties from diborane(6). Quantum chemical computations with the B3LYP/cc-pVTZ method show that the structural equivalences are maintained along the substitutions, even for non-planar systems. We use as benchmark aromatic and antiaromatic (poly)cyclic conjugated hydrocarbons: cyclobutadiene, benzene, cyclooctatetraene, pentalene, benzocyclobutadiene, naphthalene and azulene. The transformation of these conjugated hydrocarbons to the corresponding boranes is analyzed from the viewpoint of geometry and electronic structure.
Project description:The addition of AlCl3 to four-coordinate boranes of the general formula (C-N-chelate)BCl2 results in halide abstraction and formation of three-coordinate borenium cations of the general formula [(C-N-chelate)BCl]+. The latter react with both arylstannanes and arylsilanes by boro-destannylation and -desilylation, respectively, to form arylated boranes. Catalytic quantities of AlCl3 were sufficient to effect high-yielding arylation of (C-N-chelate)BCl2. Boro-destannylation is more rapid than boro-desilylation and leads to double arylation at the boron center, whereas in reactions with arylsilanes either single or double arylation occurs dependent on the nucleophilicity of the arylsilane and on the electrophilicity of the borenium cation. The electrophilicity of the borenium cation derived from 2-phenylpyridine was greater than that of the benzothiadiazole analogues, enabling the boro-desilyation of less nucleophilic silanes and the direct electrophilic borylation of 2-methylthiophene.
Project description:Boron compounds now have many applications in a number of fields, including Medicinal Chemistry. Although the uses of boron compounds in pharmacological science have been recognized several decades ago, surprisingly few are found in pharmaceutical drugs. The boron-containing compounds epitomize a new class for medicinal chemists to use in their drug designs. Carboranes are a class of organometallic compounds containing carbon (C), boron (B), and hydrogen (H) and are the most widely studied boron compounds in medicinal chemistry. Additionally, other boron-based compounds are of great interest, such as dodecaborate anions, metallacarboranes and metallaboranes. The boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) has been utilized for cancer treatment from last decade, where chemotherapy and radiation have their own shortcomings. However, the improvement in the already existing (BPA and/or BSH) localized delivery agents or new tumor-targeted compounds are required before realizing the full clinical potential of BNCT. The work outlined in this short review addresses the advancements in boron containing compounds. Here, we have focused on the possible clinical implications of the new and improved boron-based biologically active compounds for BNCT that are reported to have in vivo and/or in vitro efficacy.
Project description:Collaboration between academia and industry is a growing phenomenon within the chemistry community. These sectors have long held strong ties since academia traditionally trains the future scientists of the corporate world, but the recent drastic decrease of public funding is motivating the academic world to seek more private grants. This concept of industrial "sponsoring" is not new, and in the past, some companies granted substantial amounts of money per annum to various academic institutions in exchange for prime access to all their scientific discoveries and inventions. However, academic and industrial interests were not always aligned, and therefore the investment has become increasingly difficult to justify from industry's point of view. With fluctuating macroeconomic factors, this type of unrestricted grant has become more rare and has been largely replaced by smaller and more focused partnerships. In our view, forging a partnership with industry can be a golden opportunity for both parties and can represent a true symbiosis. This type of project-specific collaboration is engendered by industry's desire to access very specific academic expertise that is required for the development of new technologies at the forefront of science. Since financial pressures do not allow companies to spend the time to acquire this expertise and even less to explore fundamental research, partnering with an academic laboratory whose research is related to the problem gives them a viable alternative. From an academic standpoint, it represents the perfect occasion to apply "pure science" research concepts to solve problems that benefit humanity. Moreover, it offers a unique opportunity for students to face challenges from the "real world" at an early stage of their career. Although not every problem in industry can be solved by research developments in academia, we argue that there is significant scientific overlap between these two seemingly disparate groups, thereby presenting an opportunity for a symbiosis. This type of partnership is challenging but can be a win-win situation if both parties agree on some general guidelines, including clearly defined goals and deliverables, biweekly meetings to track research progress, and quarterly or annual meetings to recognize overarching, common objectives. This Account summarizes our personal experience concerning collaborations with various industrial groups and the way it impacted the research programs for both sides in a symbiotic fashion.
Project description:We report a single-molecule mechanistic investigation into 2-cyanobenzothiazole (CBT) chemistry within a protein nanoreactor. When simple thiols reacted reversibly with CBT, the thioimidate monoadduct was approximately 80-fold longer-lived than the tetrahedral bisadduct, with important implications for the design of molecular walkers. Irreversible condensation between CBT derivatives and N-terminal cysteine residues has been established as a biocompatible reaction for site-selective biomolecular labeling and imaging. During the reaction between CBT and aminothiols, we resolved two transient intermediates, the thioimidate and the cyclic precursor of the thiazoline product, and determined the rate constants associated with the stepwise condensation, thereby providing critical information for a variety of applications, including the covalent inhibition of protein targets and dynamic combinatorial chemistry.
Project description:To optimize drug candidates, modern medicinal chemists are increasingly turning to an unconventional structural motif: small, strained ring systems. However, the difficulty of introducing substituents such as bicyclo[1.1.1]pentanes, azetidines, or cyclobutanes often outweighs the challenge of synthesizing the parent scaffold itself. Thus, there is an urgent need for general methods to rapidly and directly append such groups onto core scaffolds. Here we report a general strategy to harness the embedded potential energy of effectively spring-loaded C-C and C-N bonds with the most oft-encountered nucleophiles in pharmaceutical chemistry, amines. Strain-release amination can diversify a range of substrates with a multitude of desirable bioisosteres at both the early and late stages of a synthesis. The technique has also been applied to peptide labeling and bioconjugation.
Project description:A cationic terminal iminoborane [Mes*N[triple bond, length as m-dash]B ← IPr2Me2][AlBr4] (3+[AlBr4]-) (Mes* = 2,4,6-tri-tert-butylphenyl and IPr2Me2 = 1,3-diisopropyl-4,5-dimethylimidazol-2-ylidene) has been synthesized and characterized. The employment of an aryl group and N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) ligand enables 3+[AlBr4]- to exhibit both B-centered Lewis acidity and BN multiple bond reactivities, thus allowing for the construction of tri-coordinate boron cations 5+-12+. More importantly, initial reactions involving coordination, addition, and [2 + 3] cycloadditions have been observed for the cationic iminoborane, demonstrating the potential to build numerous organoboron species via several synthetic routes.
Project description:The eight contributions here provide ample evidence that shape as a volume or as a surface is a vibrant and useful concept when applied to drug discovery. It provides a reliable scaffold for "decoration" with chemical intuition (or bias) for virtual screening and lead optimization but also has its unadorned uses, as in library design, ligand fitting, pose prediction, or active site description. Computing power has facilitated this evolution by allowing shape to be handled precisely without the need to reduce down to point descriptors or approximate metrics, and the diversity of resultant applications argues for this being an important step forward. Certainly, it is encouraging that as computation has enabled our intuition, molecular shape has consistently surprised us in its usefulness and adaptability. The first Aurelius question, "What is the essence of a thing?", seems well answered, however, the third, "What do molecules do?", only partly so. Are the topics covered here exhaustive, or is there more to come? To date, there has been little published on the use of the volumetric definition of shape described here as a QSAR variable, for instance, in the prediction or classification of activity, although other shape definitions have been successful applied, for instance, as embodied in the Compass program described above in "Shape from Surfaces". Crystal packing is a phenomenon much desired to be understood. Although powerful models have been applied to the problem, to what degree is this dominated purely by the shape of a molecule? The shape comparison described here is typically of a global nature, and yet some importance must surely be placed on partial shape matching, just as the substructure matching of chemical graphs has proved useful. The approach of using surfaces, as described here, offers some flavor of this, as does the use of metrics that penalize volume mismatch less than the Tanimoto, e.g., Tversky measures. As yet, there is little to go on as to how useful a paradigm this will be because there is less software and fewer concrete results.Finally, the distance between molecular shapes, or between any shapes defined as volumes or surfaces, is a metric property in the mathematical sense of the word. As yet, there has been little, if any, application of this observation. We cannot know what new application to the design and discovery of pharmaceuticals may yet arise from the simple concept of molecular shape, but it is fair to say that the progress so far is impressive.