Cyclic molecules are everywhere, and everything around us stems from the way they are assembled: not just taste, color and smell but also (for example) pharmaceutical drugs. Nature by itself forms molecular rings of different sizes and chains of rings of varying lengths that scientists are able to reproduce artificially. Chemists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have now devised a new technique for creating these chains of molecular rings that do not use standard chemical interactions but contact with large molecular surfaces that are electron-poor and do not exist in nature. Unlike with standard procedures, this new technique works by autocatalysis—the rarest, but also the most ambitious, type of transformation that exists in chemistry. The results of this research, published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, open up new prospects for molecular cyclization and also provide the first part of the answer to an old contradiction in classical chemistry.
Click here for original story, Chemistry: Access to forbidden rings
Source: Phys.org