Publications by authors named "F Dean Toste"

Developing multicharge and spin stabilization strategies is fundamental to enhancing the lifetime of functional organic materials, particularly for long-term energy storage in multiredox organic redox flow batteries. Current approaches are limited to the incorporation of electronic substituents to increase or decrease the overall electron density or bulky substituents to sterically shield reactive sites. With the aim to further expand the molecular toolbox for charge and spin stabilization, we introduce regioisomerism as a scaffold-diversifying design element that considers the collective and cumulative electronic and steric contributions from all of the substituents based on their relative regioisomeric arrangements.

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Neutral dual hydrogen bond donors (HBDs) are effective catalysts that enhance the electrophilicity of substrates or the Lewis/Brønsted acidity of reagents through an anion-binding mechanism. Despite their success in various enantioselective organocatalytic reactions, their application to transition metal catalysis remains rare. Herein, we report the activation of gold(I) precatalysts by chiral ureas, leading to enantioselective hydroarylation of allenes with indoles.

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Controlled modifications of amino acids are an indispensable tool for advancing fundamental and translational research based on peptides and proteins. Yet, we still lack methods to chemically modify each naturally occurring amino acid sidechain. To help address this gap, we show that N,α-diaryl oxaziridines expand the scope of bioconjugation methods to chemically modify cysteine, methionine, and tryptophan residues with evidence for additional tyrosine labelling in a proteomic context.

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Catalysis of multicomponent transformations requires controlled assembly of reactants within the active site. Supramolecular scaffolds possess synthetic microenvironments that enable precise modulation over noncovalent interactions (NCIs) engaged by reactive, encapsulated species. While molecular properties that describe the behavior of single guests in host cavities have been studied extensively, multicomponent transformations remain challenging to design and deploy.

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