MSU chemists solve long-standing problem

10 hours 26 minutes ago by Evelyn Boswell - MSU News Service

BOZEMAN - A Montana State University team says it has discovered the grail of organic chemistry and has just published a paper about its accomplishment in one of the field's top journals.

The paper by professor Tom Livinghouse and graduate students Bryce Sunsdahl and Adrian Smith appears in the Dec. 22 issue of the German chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie.

First published online in October, the highly technical paper explains how the team in MSU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry developed an inexpensive and environmentally friendly way to sequentially produce carbon-nitrogen and carbon-carbon bonds commonly found in antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals for humans and animals.

Organic chemists often produce a mixture of unneeded products in the process of making the one they want, Livinghouse explained. As a result, they often throw much material away and keep the one they want.

To solve that long-standing problem, Livinghouse said the MSU group developed a one-step process that largely eliminates waste products. The process is extremely efficient, and it saves time and money. Livinghouse describes it as green chemistry because the process is non-toxic and produces few byproducts. If done right, it minimizes the needs for external solvents. Scientists get "two bonds for the price of one."

The MSU team isn't the first to come up with the idea, but the techniques developed by other groups over the past 15 years have had very limited application, Livinghouse said.

"What we did can apply to a great many pharmaceuticals," he said.

Livinghouse said he came up with the idea about three years ago, but he praised his graduate students for making it happen over the past year. He said their work in the lab was critical to the success of the project and the newly published paper.

"Only with the very best graduate students can you do this," Livinghouse said. "I'm very proud of my students.

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MSU chemists solve long-standing problem