"Although Liang's garden is beautiful, it is not a place to stay for a long time." I also received an offer from an assistant professor at a state university in the United States, but I feel that I can better utilize my value in China.

In terms of teaching and educating people, if I can explain a problem in a simple and novel way that students can understand, I will also be very happy. At the same time, better accompanying my family is also an important motivation for me to return to my country. Professor Wang Jianchun of the Southern University of Science and Technology said.

In his early years, Wang Jianchun graduated from Peking University with a bachelor's degree and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in the United States. During his postdoctoral period, his cooperative mentor was Professor Robert Howard Grubbs, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in the United States and a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry.

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In 2021, he officially joined the Southern University of Science and Technology and is currently mainly engaged in research on organoelectrosynthesis and transition metal catalysis.

Not long ago, he and his team proposed a new method called "electrochemical recycling de-racemization", which successfully achieved the de-racemization of alcohols, solving the problem of incompatible redox potentials.Moreover, this method can complement existing photocatalytic methods and has been referred to by reviewers as a "significant key advancement."

It should be noted that this project is a result of basic research and has currently only achieved proof of concept.

However, if the "electrochemical recycling deracemization" method can be developed to be more universal and reliable, it may find applications in medicinal chemistry.

Specifically: In the synthesis process of pharmaceutical molecules, it is easy to obtain racemic molecules that are mirror images of each other, but it is difficult to obtain a single configuration of chiral molecules.

By using the "electrochemical recycling deracemization" strategy, it is possible to quickly obtain high-value pharmaceutical molecules with a single configuration from the easily obtained racemic molecules, which is expected to greatly accelerate the process of drug discovery.For instance, by leveraging this method, Wang Jianchun and colleagues have streamlined the synthesis route of a chiral molecule from six steps to just two, without the need for expensive equivalent chiral reagents.

Compared to other methods, this approach also allows for the immobilization of the catalyst on the electrode, requiring only an electric current and no additional chemical reagents, with the theoretical atomic utilization rate potentially reaching 100%.

Moreover, this method boasts advantages such as simplicity, green chemistry, and ease of purification, holding great promise in accelerating the drug development process.

All along, a famous quote from Elon Musk has been inspiring Wang Jianchun, which goes: "The hardest thing to find is a simple solution; complex solutions are relatively easier to find."

Wang Jianchun's interpretation of this statement is that the simpler (undiscovered or undervalued) strategies are more likely to be combined with other strategies, thereby being able to solve problems that were previously difficult to address.Therefore, he feels very gratified with this achievement, because "electrochemical recycling desymmetrization" is indeed a simple and effective strategy.

Starting from "the left hand cannot coincide with the right hand"

To understand this strategy, one must start with chirality. Chirality is a fundamental property of nature. Just as the left hand cannot coincide with the right hand, chiral molecules cannot coincide with their mirror images.

Referring to the terms for left and right hands, people call them R and S configurations. In fact, many drug molecules are chiral. Typically, one configuration is effective, while the other may be ineffective or even toxic.

Separation is one of the commonly used synthetic methods for drugs. If the R configuration is needed, half of the S configuration molecules must be discarded, so the efficiency can only reach up to 50% at most.So, how can this efficiency be improved? Assuming that the S configuration can be transformed into the R configuration, then the efficiency could be increased to 100%. This is precisely a hot topic of research in recent years—the "desymmetrization reaction."

Microscopic reversibility is the biggest challenge in studying desymmetrization. It refers to the fact that if the R configuration can be transformed into the S configuration, then under the same catalytic conditions, the S configuration can also be transformed into the R configuration.

Recently, research has found that using the excited-state chemistry of photocatalysis can break this microscopic reversibility.

The basic principle behind this is that the forward reaction is realized through the excited state, while the reverse reaction is realized through the ground state. The two are orthogonal to each other, thereby breaking microscopic reversibility.

However, if we reason according to this logic, photochemistry—seems to be the only exception to breaking microscopic reversibility.So, is it possible to avoid the excited state? Can electrocatalysis break the microscopic reversibility? This question is precisely the initial motivation for Wang Jianchun to carry out this research.

It is worth mentioning that in 2023, Professor Luo Sanzhong of Tsinghua University once looked forward to in a review paper: "Electrocatalysis and magnetic field catalysis have the potential to expand the boundaries of racemization."

"As if finding the last piece of the puzzle"

In fact, when he was doing postdoctoral research in the United States, Wang Jianchun has been thinking: how to combine the background of organic methodology research during his doctoral studies with the background of electrocatalysis research during his postdoctoral period.During his doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, he gained an in-depth understanding of catalyst design and structure-activity relationships; during his postdoctoral period at the California Institute of Technology, he also developed some understanding of surface chemistry in electrochemistry.

As a result, when choosing the direction of organic electrocatalysis, he paid special attention to the surface processes at the electrode.

It is for this reason that he noticed the field of "chemically modified electrodes." This field happens to be an area that organic chemists have relatively less focused on before.

After returning to his home country to establish his own research group, Wang Jianchun hoped to demonstrate the unique advantages of "chemically modified electrodes" in organic synthesis through his research, and thus chose "thermodynamically unfavorable reactions" as one of the research directions for his team.

In fact, the most important chemical reaction on Earth - photosynthesis - is precisely the process of synthesizing high-energy glucose from low-energy carbon dioxide and water by consuming light energy.It can be seen that the so-called "reverse thermodynamic reactions" do not violate the principles of thermodynamics, but are achieved by cleverly utilizing other forms of energy.

The focus of this topic on the de-racemization reaction is because the "reduction of entropy" is also one of the "reverse thermodynamic reactions" that he is concerned with.

Interestingly, people have only been able to achieve de-racemization reactions through light energy before, and have not achieved this reaction through electrical energy.

In this regard, researchers usually explain that photocatalysis can achieve an excited state process, which does not interfere with the ground state process.

However, what Wang Jianchun thinks is: is it really necessary to have an excited state to achieve this non-interference as previously described in the literature?Because he has always been very interested in chemically modified electrodes, he began to conceive: Could chemically modified electrodes be used to solve this problem?

The reason is: The anode and cathode are naturally separated, and by modifying the electrodes, a perfect state of non-interference can be achieved.

For this idea, Wang Jianchun used the word "intuitive" to describe it. In actual research, he and his team started from the perspective of physical chemistry principles, and by completing the logical chain, they fully explained the above problem.

Through theoretical analysis, they found that the key to solving this problem is to take into account the compatibility of both the negative hydrogen and the reduction potential.

After reviewing the literature of predecessors, they found that there is a linear relationship between these two quantities, so they can theoretically explain the reason why they cannot be compatible at the same time.It is worth mentioning that when we found this theoretical paper that is rarely noticed by people at ordinary times, it was as if we had found the last piece of the puzzle, bringing us great joy, said Wang Jianchun.

Next, it is necessary to verify the feasibility of each step. Since this study involves cathodic reactions and anodic reactions, which are two completely different reactions, they began to explore them in parallel.

Then, the correctness of the key ideas needs to be verified. During this period, they connected the previously verified results separately, integrated the results of the anodic and cathodic reactions, and thus proved the feasibility of this strategy.

Furthermore, this strategy is applied to the synthesis of various secondary alcohol molecules, including the synthesis of bioactive molecules that have attracted much attention.

Through this, Wang Jianchun found that this strategy can greatly expand the scope of the reaction, and has proven through experiments that this strategy has advantages such as low material catalyst usage and recyclability.Ultimately, the related paper was published under the title "Electrocatalytic cyclic deracemization enabled by a chemically modified electrode" in Nature Catalysis (IF 42.8).

Zhu Chengjie is the first author, and Wang Jianchun serves as the corresponding author [1].

Wang Jianchun added that the deracemization reaction itself is a highly interesting reaction. If the application scope of this strategy can be expanded, there may be more exciting application scenarios.

At the same time, since the chemically modified electrode can be separated by physical means, this feature will enable other anti-thermodynamic processes.

Finally, he hopes to delve into the other advantages of the chemically modified electrode in terms of mechanism, thereby achieving more interesting chemical processes.