This award will enable Professor James M. Bobbitt and members of his research group at the University of Connecticut to collaborate with Professor Tetsuo Osa, Pharmaceutical Institute, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, and colleagues, over a period of two years. The scientists will cooperate in preparing and utilizing special graphite felt electrodes coated with various catalysts, in particular, organic nitroxides, to carry out preparative, specific oxidations of organic molecules. These electrodes have very high surface areas, which make them especially valuable in preparing significant amounts of compounds through electrosynthesis. Furthermore, by selecting nitroxides with chiral (left-handed or right-handed) characteristics, i.e., distinguished only by the spatial arrangement of constituent groups around one or more atoms in the molecule, it may be possible to create catalytic electrodes capable of carrying out stereo-specific reactions. Such coated electrodes might, for example, be used to produce one enantiomer in preference to another, or to catalyze the oxidation of one of a pair of enantiomers. The work has practical applications in synthetic organic chemistry, particularly if preparative-scale procedures can be developed. The U.S. and Japanese scientists in this effort have complementary strengths. Professor Bobbitt is a synthetic organic chemist. Professor Osa ia an electroanalytical chemist, with experience in attaching various chemical species to graphite electrodes. Together they hope to make significant progress toward their goal of developing chiral catalyst-coated electrodes which can be used to carry out enantioselective oxidations and stereospecific formation of chiral centers in selected molecules.
