Highly read on pubs.acs.org in January

Chemists have invented a reagent to ease the addition of a desirable chemical group to many useful compounds. Pharmaceutical, medicinal and agricultural chemists add fluorine groups to molecules to improve certain properties — to lower toxicity, for example. However, adding a difluoromethyl group has proved complicated.

The process developed by Phil Baran at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues does the job in a simple one-pot reaction. The authors used zinc difluoromethylsulphinate salt, a white powder that is soluble in water and stable in air, making it easy to handle. In water, this produces a reactive difluromethyl radical that targets specific sites on other molecules.

In particular, Baran's reagent can add a difluoromethyl group to nitrogen-containing aromatic ring systems and onto some organic molecules containing sulphur.

J. Am. Chem. Soc. 134, 1494–1497 (2012)