A variety of widely used palladium-catalysed cross-coupling reactions can now be run in water, thanks to award-winning research.

Professor Bruce Lipshutz, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team have developed an amphiphile - TPGS-750-M - that will allow transition metal catalysis in water at room temperature.

He has now received the 2011 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Academic Award for his work.

"Conducting transition metal-catalysed cross-coupling chemistry in water instead of organic solvent has a number of potential benefits in terms of cost, environmental impact, safety, and impurity profiles," explains Aldrich Chemistry, which has backed the research.

"Increasing focus on the greenness of chemical processes has further promoted recent development in this field."

The actual process of producing reactions in water at room temperature and for water insoluble organic substrates has until now eluded scientists, the firm notes.

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TPGS–750–M: Second Generation Amphiphile for Organometallic Chemistry in Water @ RT (25/08/11)

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