This is a follow-up to the quest posted before regarding the most straightforward, but not necessarily the most elegant, synthesis of 3,4-difluorothiophene. Bear in mind, our goal was to get a decent amount of the material as swiftly as possible; a completely new reaction type for Org. Lett. would have been nice, but [...]

The actual value of a PhD has been lively debated.[1][2][3][4][5] To the best of my knowledge however, no one thus far has been able to pinpoint the exact number.

I am therefore delighted to be able to do so here, and hence put a final [...]

I chuckled a bit when I saw this graphical abstract. I like bromobenzene; I have written about it before.

Disclaimer: I haven’t even read the paper, this just caught my eye while aimlessly browsing ACS Mobile, one of my favorite apps.

Anyway, I figured I’d turn [...]

P450 enzyme CYP2D6 is of importance in medicinal chemistry, pharmacology and medicine. It belongs to one of the major group of liver enzymes that metabolize drugs (and other crap) that float around your system. For several reasons, CYP2D6 is especially troublesome for scientists working with discovering new drugs.

To name one such reason, the individual [...]

Dear average reader of Synthetic Remarks, I am dying to know

If you feel the need to get into details or ask me something, the comments are open.

Take a long good look at this reaction, recently reported in a respected journal. Have you ever seen anything like it? “Unusual formation…” — an understatement of the century, if you ask me. What the Hell is going on here? A porphyrin-ish type material spitting out a C7H5 unit (a toluene minus a handful of [...]

Quick one today. If you’d like an email alert whenever I post something new, feel free to fill out this form. This way, you don’t have to check in here every day and look for new stuff (and be disappointed most of the time, statistically.)

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I would never [...]

I confess to having been quite inactive here lately. Lots of things to manage these days. But, I have certainly not given up writing!

Evidence A

“Numerous nitrogens”
Nature Chem. 2013, 5, 79 (DOI: 10.1038/nchem.1553)

Alternatively, if you can’t make it through their pay wall, Nature Publishing Group kindly presents the whole [...]

Aldehydes to esters in one step. Palladium catalyzed. Acetone(!) as the oxidant. Brilliant on so many levels.

Org. Lett. 2013, ASAP (DOI: 10.1021/ol303298g)

I admire their honesty about the fact that the stumbled upon this protocol when identifying byproducts from other planned reactions, and then realized [...]

It just struck me. There has never been a chemistry genius. You can quote me on that, but don’t
get me wrong and please do read the entire post first.

Amazing discoveries in chemistry have been made, are being made and will be made. Chemistry has
so far given us penicillin that has [...]