A German research team claims to have developed a way of making the catalytic activity of coupling reactions greener and faster using a palladium catalyst.

In response to increasing environmental awareness, much recent research has focussed on using water in organic synthesis to eliminate the need for environmentally-unfriendly organic solvents, but thus far this process has not resulted in improvements in the coupling reaction.

The team at the Technical University of Darmstadt found that by synthesising highly water-soluble ligands for the palladium catalyst, they could perform coupling reactions in pure water with significantly smaller amounts of catalyst.

It was also found, claim the team, that the catalysts were anything from ten to 100 times more active than in existing systems.

Herbert Plenio, who co-conducted the research, told the Royal Society of Chemistry: "Water is primarily viewed as a green solvent. But we wanted to show that water can be the solvent in which carbon-carbon bond forming reactions work much better than in organic solvents."

He added: "Improvements in catalysis will result in better synthesis - from an ecological as well as from an economic point of view.

"The particular challenge is to design chemical transformations and chemical processes in such a manner that they produce a minimum amount of waste and require as little energy as possible. Catalysis is the tool to achieve just that."

Source:

Water - not just a solvent, 31/10/07

http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ChemScience/Volume/2007/12/water_not_just_solvent.asp

Aqueous cross-coupling: highly efficient Suzuki–Miyaura coupling of N-heteroaryl halides and N-heteroarylboronic acids, 30/10/07

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/GC/article.asp?doi=b711965h


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