Deep eutectic solvents for improved biomass pretreatment: Current status and future prospective towards sustainable processes.

Pretreatment processes - recognized as critical steps for efficient biomass refining - have received much attention over the last two decades. In this context, deep eutectic solvents (DES) have emerged as a novel alternative to conventional solvents representing a step forward in achieving more sustainable processes with both environmental and economic benefits. This paper presents an updated review of the state-of-the-art of DES-based applications in biorefinery schemes.

Droplet-Assisted Microfluidic Fabrication and Characterization of Multifunctional Polysaccharide Microgels Formed by Multicomponent Reactions.

Polysaccharide-based microgels have broad applications in multi-parametric cell cultures, cell-free biotechnology, and drug delivery. Multicomponent reactions like the Passerini three-component and the Ugi four-component reaction are shown in here to be versatile platforms for fabricating these polysaccharide microgels by droplet microfluidics with a narrow size distribution. While conventional microgel formation requires pre-modification of hydrogel building blocks to introduce certain functionality, in multicomponent reactions one building block can be simply exchanged by another to introduce and extend functionality in a library-like fashion.

Chlorambucil Conjugated Ugi Dendrimers with PAMAM-NH₂ Core and Evaluation of Their Anticancer Activity.

Herein, a new Ugi multicomponent reaction strategy is described to enhance activity and solubility of the chemotherapeutic drug chlorambucil through its conjugation to poly(amidoamine) (PAMAM-NH₂) dendrimers with the simultaneous introduction of lipidic (-Pr) and cationic (⁻NH₂) or anionic (⁻COOH) groups. Standard viability assays were used to evaluate the anticancer potential of the water-soluble dendrimers against PC-3 prostate and HT-29 colon cancer cell lines, as well as non-cancerous mouse NIH3T3 fibroblasts. It could be demonstrated that the anticancer activity against PC-3 cells was considerably improved when both chlorambucil and ⁻NH₂ (cationic) groups were present on the dendrimer surface ().

Diversity Driven Decoration and Ligation of Fullerene by Ugi and Passerini Multicomponent Reactions.

Aiming at providing an efficient and versatile method for the diversity-oriented decoration and ligation of fullerenes, we report the first C derivatization strategy based on isocyanide-multicomponent reactions (I-MCRs). The approach comprises the use of Passerini and Ugi reactions for assembling pseudo-peptidic scaffolds (i.e.