The Future of Skeletal Editing

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.