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  • Matters Arising
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Questioning claims of monitoring the Michael addition reaction at the single-molecule level

Nature Chemistry (2024)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 23 September 2024

The Original Article was published on 15 May 2023

arising from C. Yang et al. Nature Chemistry https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-023-01212-2 (2023)

In this work Yang et al.1 claim that an enantioselective Michael addition reaction with a barrier of 16 kcal mol−1 occurs at the single-molecule level in frozen solvent by measuring fluctuations in current flowing across graphene-based molecular devices. The article, however, contains major scientific errors that undermine their conclusions. We highlight issues with the fabrication of the devices, a lack of characterization, discrepancies between theory and experiment, unreliable inelastic electron tunnelling spectra (IETS) and a perceived misinterpretation of noise as evidence of reaction.

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Fig. 1: Six different possible products that can be formed from a Michael addition reaction of 1,3-dicarbonyl compound to maleimide.

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Data sharing is not applicable as this Article is a comment on a published work.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Tekle-Smith for discussions. This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant no. CHE-2023568 and by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), grant no. 680.92.18.01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Physics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Latha Venkataraman

  2. Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Latha Venkataraman

  3. Huygens-Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratorium, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Jan van Ruitenbeek

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  1. Latha Venkataraman
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  2. Jan van Ruitenbeek
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Contributions

L.V. and J.v.R. contributed equally to analysing the data in Yang et al.1 and writing this Matters Arising.

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Correspondence to Latha Venkataraman or Jan van Ruitenbeek.

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Venkataraman, L., van Ruitenbeek, J. Questioning claims of monitoring the Michael addition reaction at the single-molecule level. Nat. Chem. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-024-01631-9

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