The morning session of the Arthur C. Cope Award and Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards just finished – I was really impressed with F. Dean Toste’s talk, which was a whirlwind tour of some of the work his group has done involving gold(I)-catalyzed reactions.

There are now a number of groups exploring the chemistry of gold(I) and gold(III) complexes – Toste’s group has focused on gold(I) complexes, which are air-/moisture-tolerant and able to catalyze a number of reactions, including the stereoselective cyclopropanation of olefins and intramolecular acetylenic Schmidt reactions (making substituted pyrroles). They’ve also shown that these reactions can be used to make natural products, recently demonstrating that the gold(I)-catalyzed cyclization of a silyl enol ether onto an alkyne enabled them to rapidly synthesize (+)-lycopladine A (in eight steps with 17% overall yield from the starting enone).

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Two-thirds of all species groups are yet to be unearthed.

Thanks to movies such as Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and visits to natural history museums, ‘dinosaur hunter’ is one scientific job that schoolchildren aspire to. And according to a study of dinosaur diversity, these budding palaeontologists will have plenty to do: researchers estimate that more than 1,000 new groups of dinosaur species remain to be discovered.

Read the story here.