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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.
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Simple solution for tricky chemistry. Nature 482, 443 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/482443e
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/482443e