Reports: SE
48281-SE Advances in Combinatorial Catalysis and Screening, at the ACS National Meeting , August 17-21, 2008, Philadelphia, PA
This ACS PRF SE-Grant provided essential support for this successful ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Symposium, jointly organized by the applicant, David Berkowitz (U. Nebraska), on the North American continent, and Andreas Pfaltz (U. Basel), on the European continent, to facilitate a trans-Atlantic discussion of some of the most important recent advances in combinatorial catalysis and screening. The symposium featured both AM and PM sessions, with a half-dozen speakers from U.S. universities and a half-dozen scientists from European universities sharing the podium.
Philadelphia proved to be an excellent venue for this symposium, for both ease of travel from Europe and for the high concentration of both academic institutions and pharmaceutical process chemists in the Northeast Corridor. Though on a Thursday, the symposium drew multiple attendees of the 236th National ACS Meeting, with standing room only audiences at peak times.
Combinatorial catalysis is an important comtemporary theme that will resonates with synthetic organic chemists, medicinal chemists, organometallic/inorganic chemists, and process chemists, and even materials scientists. From the point of view of the Petroleum Research Fund, most of the research discussed in this symposium would be considered of fundamental interest (i.e. relating to catalysis). We would point out two general themes that we think relate particularly well to PRF goals. On the one hand, there is challenge of converting cheap, petroleum stream-derived achiral organics (e.g. simple aromatic or aliphatic olefins or there derivative aldehydes) into value-added, chiral, enantiomerically enriched building blocks for industrial or pharmaceutical synthetic applications. This challenge lies at the heart of modern asymmetric catalysis research.
Discovery and optimization of chiral catalysts for asymmetric synthesis is still a slow process, because our present knowledge is not sufficient to allow a truly rational design of new catalysts. Therefore, the development of combinatorial methods for the preparation and screening of catalyst libraries has become an important research focus. During the last few years, efficient techniques have been reported that allow high-throughput parallel screening of chiral catalysts. However, parallel screening methodology had not been emphasized at recent ACS meetings, and so a key aim of this symposium to highlight new tools being developed for this purpose. We believe that this goal was met.
The organizers brought bring together scientists from both sides of the Atlantic (50:50 split-see Nugget for a listing all speakers), who brought diverse techniques to the table, both in catalysis (homogeneous organometallic, organocatalytic and heterogeneous) and in sensing (ESI-MS, calorimetry, thermography, UV/vis, fluorescence). We believe that this made for especially useful interactions across the symposium, including in the formal and informal discussions, before, during and after the symposium itself.
