The biggest challenge is to make the methods more general so that each reaction works reliably on a wide range of skeletons. As chemists work to strengthen the foundations of skeletal editing, these techniques are already reaching areas beyond drug discovery. For instance, polymer chemists Alexander Zukovitsky and Rachel Dietzler at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have shown that similar reactions can edit the carbon-based backbones of polymers. Such reactions might eventually help to recycle plastics or make it easier to use sustainable biological molecules in everyday polymers.
In the past two years, there has been an explosion in the number of papers published relating to 'skeletal editing', a technique that allows chemists to precisely edit a molecule by deleting, adding or swapping single atoms in its core.
Although many of these methods are early in development, researchers hope skeletal editing could revolutionize how organic chemists design molecules, dramatically speeding up the drug-discovery process.
This is an audio version of our Feature: ‘Almost magical’: chemists can now move single atoms in and out of a molecule’s core
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