UW Chemists Break Electron Transfer Selectivity Barrier

Chemists use complex compounds to create life-saving medicines, build advanced high-tech materials, and mimic natural biological systems. To make more complex compounds, synthetic chemists have relied on single-electron transfer as one of the most powerful strategies to activate and couple otherwise unreactive molecules together.

For decades, the field has been constrained by a fundamental principle of electron transfer: when two molecules compete for an electron, nature will favor transfers to the more easily reduced partner. However, work led by chemists at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, in collaboration with researchers at Colorado State University and University of Colorado Boulder, is showing that there is a different way to think about designing reactions. Their fundamentally novel strategy, published recently in Nature , fixes a long-standing limitation in electron-transfer selectivity, could open up many otherwise inaccessible and potentially valuable coupling reactions.