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Chemical routes aiming to replace high-energy, complex catalytic industrial processes with ambient-condition alternatives.
Researchers engineered Escherichia coli with up to 15 nitroreductase gene deletions that let the cells retain nitroaromatic compounds normal strains destroy. Industry makes these chemicals with nitric acid under heat and hazard that a cell-based route avoids.
Reality
Yokohama National University chemists converted pyridine to piperidine at over 99% yield with a cobalt catalyst kept between metal and oxide. That state drifts during electrolysis, so the balance depends on how the cell is run as well as on how the catalyst is made.
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Chonnam National University chemists used dichloromethane as an amide coupling reagent, making more than 20 grams of the drug moclobemide at over 99% purity. The open test is whether using up a chlorinated solvent as a reagent leaves less waste than the coupling reagents it would replace.
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Julian West's lab reports in Nature Catalysis that a pair of carboxylic acids, plus iron, sulfur and a change of light color, adds a carbon fragment across an alkene double bond, a job usually given to palladium.
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The Argonne-led hybrid pairs a cheap semiconductor with a light-absorbing membrane from salt-loving microbes, and out-produced the semiconductor alone by more than five times.
Reality