![A team of Japanese researchers have developed a novel platform for capturing the structure of labile intermediate species in chemical reactions with an unprecedented level […]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/NEWSICON2-620x300.png "Crystallography without Crystals – Using Molecular “Cages” to Study Non-crystallizable Compounds")
A team of Japanese researchers have developed a novel platform for capturing the structure of labile intermediate species in chemical reactions with an unprecedented level of resolution. This exciting new finding, which made use of the established technique X-ray crystallography, could provide new insights into chemical reaction mechanisms.
X-ray crystallography has long been the ultimate weapon for the structural identification of important compounds in a synthetic chemist’s arsenal. When X-rays are fired at a single crystal of a compound of interest, they will be diffracted into many specific directions, and a crystallographer can use the information in the angles and intensities of these diffracted rays to determine the three-dimensional structure of the compound. Nonetheless, X-ray crystallography cannot provide informative data for compounds that fail to form sufficiently large, well-defined crystal structures. Many of the intermediate compounds formed in chemical reactions fall into this category and so efforts to elucidate their structure at high resolution have been consistently frustrated.
Source: K Ikemoto et al, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2014, DOI: 10.1021/ja502996h
