Most of the chemical materials around us are built from carbon atoms. However, carbon’s neighbors in the periodic table, namely, boron and nitrogen, can act as alternative building blocks for new compounds. Bonds between boron and nitrogen play the same structural role in molecules as bonds between carbon atoms, albeit with a major difference: their charge is unevenly distributed and they enter into chemical reactions more easily. This is why these compounds are widely used to create materials ranging from durable high-temperature ceramics to flexible polymer electronics. At the same time, there were only two methods for forming boron-nitrogen bonds until recently, which greatly limited the variety of molecules available for synthesis.
Chemists from the Institute of Organoelement Compounds RAS have proposed a new method that makes it possible to create a bond between nitrogen and boron in organic molecules. To produce this reaction, the authors used active nitrogen-containing particles (nitrenes) and organic compounds with boron atoms. Thanks to their high reactive capacity, nitrenes easily fit into the bond between boron and hydrogen, changing the chemical properties of the entire molecule. This is similar to how inserting a new word in the middle of a sentence can change its meaning.
However, the speed of interaction of nitrenes with boron-containing molecules turned out to be very high. In order to control the process and prevent the formation of a complex mixture of products, the scientists used a catalyst that directs the energy of the molecules in the right direction. The authors tested more than 40 different catalysts before discovering that ruthenium and rhodium complexes with amino acids produce the best results.
“We hope that the new reaction will become a useful tool for synthetic chemists. It allows us to form bonds between organic compounds with boron atoms and a variety of nitrogen-containing molecules, including natural and biologically active compounds. This approach can be used to create bright fluorescent tags for biochemical research or materials for flexible organic electronics,” Dmitry Perekalin, doctor of chemical sciences, is quoted as saying by the Russian Science Foundation.
