What is it about?

Proteins and nylons have common features, in which long chain molecules are strung together by amide bonds. We recently developed a series of molecular ruthenium catalysts to break down even the toughest amide bonds by hydrogenation under relatively mild conditions.

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Why is it important?

Since amide bonds are frequently found in nature, CO2-derived amides such as formamides (and our materials society based on fossil resources), the hydrogenation method we provided this time has potential to pave a new road for millennium chemical production based on renewable resources, CO2 (and also based on recycling/reusing wasteful amides such as nylons, Kevlars, etc.).

Perspectives

The changes we made to the catalyst allowed some tricky amide bonds to be selectively cleaved for the first time. This catalyst has great potential for making designer peptides for pharmaceutics and could also be used to recover materials from waste plastics to help realize an anthropogenic chemical carbon cycle.

Professor Susumu SAITO
Nagoya Univ

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Multifaceted catalytic hydrogenation of amides via diverse activation of a sterically confined bipyridine–ruthenium framework, Scientific Reports, May 2017, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-01645-z.
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