Project description
Towards energy-efficient chemical reactions using electron bifurcation
Endergonic catalysis refers to chemical reactions that require an input of energy to proceed and is implicated in the conversion of low-energy substances into high-energy products. Although useful for creating complex materials from simple ones, endergonic catalysis is challenging. Nature drives such energy-requiring (endergonic) reactions by coupling them with energy-releasing (exergonic) reactions. The ERC-funded BifurCAT project aims to create artificial catalysts that mimic this process. This will enable the use of common, environmentally friendly compounds such as formic acid to drive difficult reactions, leading to valuable pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. Overall, the study will offer an energy-efficient strategy for chemical synthesis.
Objective
Endergonic catalysis converts low-energy substrates into high-energy products. Such reactions are highly desirable in academia and industry as they allow the transformation of abundant starting materials into complex products. However, endergonic reactions are impossible by classical catalysis, since the reverse reaction to the starting materials always dominates. Nature found an amazing way to drive endergonic reduction reactions catalytically by coupling an energetically uphill reduction to a separate, energetically downhill reduction. This strategy is called electron bifurcation and has been discovered with quinone- and flavin-dependent enzymes. No artificial catalysts capable of electron bifurcation have been realised to date. In BifurCAT, I propose the design, realisation, and application of molecular electron bifurcation catalysts. The key to achieving this goal is the precise localisation of two designed, organic redox sites in close proximity. This mimics the enzymatic strategy of splitting two electrons of a medium-potential reductant into a strongly reducing electron at the expense of a second, weakly reducing electron at separate redox sites. Electron bifurcation allows using environmentally benign, abundant, organic reductants such as formic acid or ascorbic acid to drive energetically uphill one-electron reductions at the strongly reducing redox site. Currently, these reactions require super-stoichiometric, rare-earth metal reductants or constant irradiation. I propose to demonstrate the utility of this new approach by applications in reductive incorporation of carbon dioxide into organic substrates and challenging dearomatisation reactions, which both lead to highly sought-after compounds for the preparation of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and precursors to organic materials. BifurCAT has the aim to change our view on energetically impossible reactions and to provide a resource- and energy-conserving, alternative strategy inspired by nature.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural scienceschemical sciencescatalysis
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteinsenzymes
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
80333 Muenchen
Germany