DCC · Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry

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Project objective

The development of supramolecular catalysts that rival the efficiency and selectivity of enzymes is one of the holy grails in chemistry. We believe that the dynamic combinatorial approach has the potential to become a useful new tool for catalysts discovery and synthesis.The project will focus on the synthesis of new catalysts for hydrolysis reactions and Lewis-acic catalysed Diels-Alder reactions. As in the catalytic antibody approach, the use of a transition state analogue (TSA) as a template will induce the formation of receptors for these species that should make good catalysts. An important advantage over the catalytic antibody approach is that we have control over the recognition functionalities that will be incorporated into the prospective catalysts. In a first time, we intend to synthesise new non-polar dithiol building blocks for receptors/catalysts as well as explore hydrogen-bond donating and accepting building blocks and hydrids. We will exploit fully the versatile characteristic of L-cysteine in providing thiol functionality, homochirality and a solubilising carboxylate group in the same molecule. We also propose to extend this approach by incorporating metal centres into the catalysts. Using a TSA, which bind (weakly) to the metal centre it should be possible to select and amplify the best catalyst from dynamic combinatorial libraries.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

• University of Cambridge · CambridgeCoordinatorUnited Kingdom

Links

• View on CORDIS