08/10/2026
🧪 Carboxylic acids are abundant, stable, and widely available building blocks in organic chemistry. Turning them into reactive radicals through decarboxylation offers an attractive way to form new carbon–carbon bonds under mild conditions.
Researchers from IOCB Prague, the University of Regensburg, and the University of Strathclyde have now developed a photo(electro)chemical strategy for engaging native carboxylic acids in decarboxylative functionalization. The study includes Luigi Dolcini, Lucie Ludvíková, Jakub Krištof, Michał Domański, Mattia Lepori, Soňa Boháčová, Daniel Bím, Tomáš Slanina, and Joshua Philip Barham.
The team applied the method to reactions of aliphatic carboxylic acids with nitrogen-containing heteroarenes, demonstrating a net oxidative process and assessing the reaction scope, scale-up, and green chemistry metrics.
To understand how the reaction works, the researchers combined transient absorption spectroscopy, radical trapping, EPR experiments, and computational analysis. These studies revealed a key role of the protic solvent, which helps activate the excited dibenzo-fused heterocyclic ketone catalyst.
The results point to a solvent-gated excited-state proton relay mechanism, where proton and electron transfer processes work together to activate native carboxylic acids and generate radical intermediates for further functionalization.
📓 Read the paper:
Dolcini, L.; Ludvíková, L.; Krištof, J.; Domański, M.; Lepori, M.; Boháčová, S.; Bím, D.; Slanina, T.; Barham, J. P. Engaging Native Carboxylic Acids via Solvent-Gated Proton Relay for Photo(electro)chemical Decarboxylative Functionalization. Chemical Science 2026. DOI: 10.1039/D6SC05552D
