Guo Xuefeng's group, Mo Fanyang's group and collaborators have made a series of progress in the kinetics of single-molecule catalytic reactions

As an important part of chemical synthesis, catalytic reactions are widely used in pharmaceutical production and petrochemical fields

Recently, the research group of Professor Xuefeng Guo from the School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering of Peking University, the research group of Professor Fanyang Mo from the School of Materials Science and Engineering of Peking University, the research group of Professor Kendall N.

Figure 1.

Guo Xuefeng's research group has long been committed to the study of single-molecule reaction dynamics, and together with collaborators reveal new mechanisms and new phenomena that are concealed by the ensemble average

Recently, the research group and collaborators have further used molecular engineering principles to prepare single-molecule devices with catalysts as the functional center to monitor active intermediates in the catalytic cycle (Figure 2)

Figure 2.

For the single-molecule palladium catalyst, the research group studied the Suzuki-Miyaura coupling reaction catalyzed by it

Figure 3.

The research team directly observed the transition from the ligand exchange species Pd(OR)(Ar) to the pre-transmetallated four-membered ring intermediate and the active intermediates before and after the transmetalation in the catalytic cycle

In addition to metal-organic catalysis, organic small-molecule catalysis is also in its golden age, and it also has a wide range of applications

Figure 4.

In addition, in the benzoin condensation signal, the research team only found clusters of electrical signals in the low concentration range, and further demonstrated by autocorrelation analysis, combined with control experiments, found the non-covalent interaction between the substrate and the catalyst

The ensemble mechanism experiment outlines the catalytic cycle by presenting some of the node information (that is, the capture and characterization of intermediates), and the catalytic cycle is divided into several independent steps for research, so it is static and partial

The device characterization and molecular synthesis of the above two tasks were completed by Yang Chen from Guo Xuefeng's group and Zhang Lei from Mo Fanyang's group