Research Fields

The methodologies aimed at the synthesis of enantiomerically pure substances represent today one of the most advanced research fields in the field of "green" organic chemistry. In this research field, small organic molecules are used in high efficiency catalytic reactions in terms of yield and diastereisomeric and enantiomeric purity.

• BF Laboratory
• Asymmetric Synthesis Lab

The replacement of traditional oil-based materials with renewable substrates, solvents and catalysts is essential for the development of sustainable synthetic methodologies. In this context, the exploitment of polysaccharides of marine origin, such as chitosan (deacetylated chitin) and alginates appears highly attractive as it does not compete with food production.
This project, carried out in collaboration with Dr. Nathalie Tanchoux (CNRS, Montpellier, France), unveils the utility of these renewable materials - more specifically alginates from brown algae - in enantioselective catalysis. It takes advantage of i) the high functional group density (>5 mmol carboxylic acid units per gram) of alginates, and of ii) their high propensity to form stable gels (hydro-, solvo-, aero-) characterised by attractive mechanical properties and high surface areas. Thus, alginates are used as gel supports for chiral organic catalysts and as chirality inducing elements, disclosing new opportunities in heterogeneous catalysis.

• BF Laboratory

Structural determination plays a fundamental role in understanding reactions. The most recent multidimensional NMR and X-ray diffractometry techniques allow to determine the molecular structure and conformation both in solution and in the solid state.
On the other hand, the absolute configuration is obtained thanks to the optical properties of the enantiomers to rotate the circular polarized light. For this purpose, we have the electronic and vibrational circular dichrosim (ECD and VCD) supported by DFT calculations.
For more details see the NMR laboratory.

• Organic spectroscopy Laboratory

Compounds that exist as a mixture of rapidly interconverting stereoisomers are often conveniently, albeit inaccurately, viewed as one average structure. A close look reveals that organic compounds are generally fluxional and adopt more than one conformation or configuration. The low energy barrier to interconversion is often difficult to distinguish between the individual isomers of stereolabile compounds, but the interconversion of stereoisomers exhibiting anisochronous nuclei can be monitored by variable-temperature NMR spectroscopy when the process is slow on the NMR time scale.

• Organic Spectroscopy Laboratory

The in silico modeling of organic reactions and conformational processes allows to evaluate the energy barriers and the reaction paths, in order to significantly reduce the time for the search for the most efficient catalysts.
Furthermore, in recent years the experimental study of atropisomers could be compared with the computational data. The advances of new softwares have produced programs that are easily used by any chemist to calculate the structures and properties of molecules; it is possible to find the 3D-structure of the fundamental states, the transiction states and calculated the free Gibbs activation energy ΔG#, it is also possible to calculate NMR and CD spectra, which are important to establish the absolute configurations. The computational method very popular and used by us is the density functional theory (DFT) implemented on Gaussian09 Program.

• Organic spectroscopy Laboratory