From 01/03/2016 to
28/02/2018
This proposal deals with the development of an innovative and unconventional catalytic de novo approach to β-amino acids,
compounds of remarkable biological significance, using simple, available and abundant carbon dioxide (CO2) as C1
synthon. Specifically, NOVOCAT will promote a synergistic catalytic C-N bond-cleavage/CO2 insertion event of readily
available aziridines from a synergistic and rather challenging C-N cleavage/CO2 insertion event. The project will offer all the
necessary understanding behind the factors influencing both C-N bond-cleavage and the subsequent CO2 insertion event,
thus opening up new horizons in preparative organic chemistry as well as offering solutions to a social, industrial and
academic problem such as the use of CO2 as chemical feedstock. NOVOCAT´s design will allow for promoting a
counterintuitive catalytic desymmetrization or dynamic kinetic resolution events of aziridines with CO2 en route to β-amino
acids. This proposal will lead to new knowledge in synthetic design, thus providing new logics in retrosynthetic analysis that
will likely attract the interest of both pharmaceutical and industrial laboratories.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement 796460
Base‐Mediated Defluorosilylation of sp2 & sp3 C–F Bonds
X. W. Liu, C. Zarate, R. Martin
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2019
DOI: 0.1002/anie.201813294
Dr. Liu talked about his MSCA-IF research project with a group of high-school students. He also took this chance to share with them his journey as a researcher. Crazy about