Renewable Electricity Enables Green Routes to Fine Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals.

Syntheses of chemicals using renewable electricity and when generating high atom economies are considered green and sustainable processes. In the present state of affairs, electrochemical manufacturing of fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals is not as common place as it could be and therefore, merits more attention. There is also a need to turn attention toward the electrochemical synthesis of valuable chemicals from recyclable greenhouse gases that can accelerate the process of circular economy.

Digitising chemical synthesis in automated and robotic flow.

Continuous flow chemical synthesis is already known to have many attributes that give it superiority over batch processes in several respects. To expand these advantages with those from automation will only drive such enabling technologies further into the faster producing, more efficient 21 century chemical world. In this report we present several examples of algorithmic chemical search, along with flow platforms that link hardware and digital chemical operations on software.

Memory of chirality in a room temperature flow electrochemical reactor.

Chiral compounds have become of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry as they possess various biological activities. Concurrently, the concept of "memory of chirality" has been proven as a powerful tool in asymmetric synthesis, while flow chemistry has begun its rise as a new enabling technology to add to the ever increasing arsenal of techniques available to the modern day chemist. Here, we have employed a new simple electrochemical microreactor design to oxidise an L-proline derivative at room temperature in continuous flow.

Interfacial Photoelectrochemical Catalysis: Solar-Induced Green Synthesis of Organic Molecules.

Many oxidation and reduction reactions in conventional organic synthesis rely on harsh conditions, toxic or corrosive substances, and environmentally damaging chemicals. In addition, competing reactions may take place, some of which produce hazardous waste products and, therefore, reaction selectivity suffers. To overcome such synthetic drawbacks, an enormous effort is being devoted to find alternative processes that operate much more efficiently, requiring milder conditions to contribute to a greener economy and provide urgently needed new pathways with enhanced selectivity.

Memory of Chirality in Flow Electrochemistry: Fast Optimisation with DoE and Online 2D-HPLC.

Amino acid derivatives undergo non-Kolbe electrolysis to afford enantiomerically enriched α-alkoxyamino derivatives through intermediate chiral carbenium ions. The products contain N,O-acetals which are important structural motifs found in bioactive natural products. The reaction is performed in a continuous flow electrochemical reactor coupled to a 2D-HPLC for immediate online analysis.

Memory of Chirality as a Prominent Pathway for the Synthesis of Natural Products through Chiral Intermediates.

The ability of a chiral molecule to be able to transform from one structure to another, whilst remembering its original molecular information by means of an appropriate transition state is an abstract notion that may very well play a key role in important synthetic processes, and has thus attracted a considerable amount of attention among the chemistry community. Here, we have highlighted this concept of "memory of chirality" (MOC) and extended it beyond the case of a simple molecule to larger and more complex natural products. Updated approaches that have recently been elucidated to obtain these asymmetric natural products are described, some of which may, until now, have been overcomplicated or overlooked.

Advances in electro- and sono-microreactors for chemical synthesis.

The anatomy of electrochemical flow microreactors is important to safely perform chemical reactions in order to obtain pure and high yielding substances in a controlled and precise way that excludes the use of supporting electrolytes. Flow microreactors are advantageous in handling unstable intermediates compared to batch techniques and have efficient heat/mass transfer. Electrode nature (cathode and anode) and their available exposed surface area to the reaction mixture, parameters of the spacer, flow rate and direction greatly affects the efficiency of the electrochemical reactor.