Department of Chemistry (Chicago Tri-Institutional Centre for Chemical Methods and Library Development), University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
Nat Chem. 2013 May;5(5):423-7. doi: 10.1038/nchem.1612. Epub 2013 Mar 31.
The identification of new reactions expands our knowledge of chemical reactivity and enables new synthetic applications. Accelerating the pace of this discovery process remains challenging. We describe a highly effective and simple platform for screening a large number of potential chemical reactions in order to discover and optimize previously unknown catalytic transformations, thereby revealing new chemical reactivity. Our strategy is based on labelling one of the reactants with a polyaromatic chemical tag, which selectively undergoes a photoionization/desorption process upon laser irradiation, without the assistance of an external matrix, and enables rapid mass spectrometric detection of any products originating from such labelled reactants in complex reaction mixtures without any chromatographic separation. This method was successfully used for high-throughput discovery and subsequent optimization of two previously unknown benzannulation reactions.
新反应的鉴定扩展了我们对化学反应性的认识，并为新的合成应用提供了可能。加速这一发现过程仍然具有挑战性。我们描述了一种非常有效和简单的平台，用于筛选大量潜在的化学反应，以发现和优化以前未知的催化转化，从而揭示新的化学反应性。我们的策略是用一个多环芳烃化学标签标记其中一个反应物，当用激光照射时，该标签选择性地经历光离解/解吸过程，而无需外部基质的辅助，并能够在没有任何色谱分离的情况下，快速进行质谱检测，以发现复杂反应混合物中任何源自标记反应物的产物。该方法成功地用于高通量发现和随后优化两个以前未知的苯并环化反应。
