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How to rip apart molecules

Brute force added to the list of ways to do clever chemistry.

Here's a new trick for making molecules — chemists have succeeded in literally ripping the bonds between atoms apart, rather than using the usual suspects of heat, pressure, light or electricity to drive a chemical reaction.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on March 21, 2007
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Using mechanical force to rip apart a molecule and get a particular product due to directional motion is really a great achievement. However, I feel optical tweezers and spanners can do the job more neatly than the ultrasound. One can hold the molecule at one point by a tweezer and then use another tweezer or spanner to pull it apart and take the broken part to the desired place for selective chemistry.

Posted by: Ravindra Pratap Singh | March 27, 2007 06:08 AM

We agree that the use of optical tweezers and force spectroscopy
>holds great potential for the study of mechanophores. However, we must point out that one advantage of ultrasound over these single molecule techniques is that the reactions can be done in bulk. This opens the possibility of using mechanical forces in chemical synthesis, which can not be accomplished by applying force to a single molecule at a time. Thus ultimately we feel that both single-molecule and bulk techniques will be influential in the future development of the field.

Posted by: Charles Hickenboth | May 11, 2007 02:54 AM

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