Month: March 2020

ERC Advanced Grant for Miquel Costas

Today the European Research Council announced the grantees of their ERC Advanced Grants, among which featured our Miquel Costas (ICREA Academia) with his “Enantioselective C-H Oxidation Guided by Rational Catalyst Design” project. This five-year project will enable him to continue on his excellent path to understanding in great detail the secrets of C-H oxidation chemistry. Congratulations

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Human Frontiers Science Program project for Sílvia Osuna

Today the Human Frontier Science Program has announced the list of the awardees in the latest 2020 call, among which featured our Sílvia Osuna (ICREA) with a research project on “the evolution of conformational and kinetic ensembles during functional transitions” (RGP0054/2020). The team of the project is composed by Prof. Tokuriki (grant coordinator, University of

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Site-Selective and Product Chemoselective Aliphatic C–H Bond Hydroxylation

Site-selective and product chemoselective aliphatic C–H bond oxidation of 1,2-diols and of polyhydroxylated substrates using iron and manganese catalysts and hydrogen peroxide as terminal oxidant is described. The reaction capitalizes on the use of fluorinated alcohol solvents such as 2,2,2-trifluoroethanol (TFE) and 1,1,1,3,3,3-hexafluoro-2-propanol (HFIP), which exert a strong polarity reversal in the hydroxyl moieties of

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Oxoiron(IV) complex formation by a soluble methane monooxygenase type activation

In soluble methane monooxygenase enzymes (sMMO) dioxygen (O2) is activated at a diiron(II) center to form an oxodiiron(IV) intermediate Q that performs the challenging oxidation of methane to methanol. An analogous mechanism of O2 activation at mono- or di-nuclear iron centres is rare in the synthetic chemistry. Herein, we report a mononuclear non-heme iron(II)-cyclam complex

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New non-covalent interactions between boron clusters and aromatic rings

Exploration and comprehension of chemical bonding is one of the central tasks in chemistry. Here, a non-covalent interaction, a nido-cage···? bond, is discovered in a collaborative work between Deshuang Du and Prof. Yan from Nanjing University and Prof. Jordi Poater at the University of Barcelona (ex-IQCC) and Prof. Miquel Solà of IQCC (Univ. Girona). The

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