For Aspiring Photochemists Young and Old
From time to time, it’s important to look back at some of the basics of photochemistry with a few tutorials. Every day, someone somewhere in a chemistry lab near you turns on an LED for the very first time. And while that aspiring photochemist stares hopefully at the warm blue glow shining from their fume hood dreaming of what’s to come, (Seriously kids, don’t do this. Wear your orange safety glasses, these lights are really, really bright), they are overcome by a similar panic. “I don’t have any idea what I’m doing”. At this moment it seems like there are only two choices, fake it and keep making molecules or turn off the LEDs and read a bunch of reviews. Now, there are more photochemistry great reviews than someone can read in a lifetime, many spanning 100s of pages documenting the entirety of human history since “Let there be light.” A few of our favorites that we’ve shared over the years are here, here, and here. And while no one has actually read every word in these reviews, they are a useful resource when you need a starting set of references for a thesis or a set of reagents to set up a screen or have a few free weeks to fill. However, this is not always the most welcoming starting point for someone new to the field.
Luckily, there’s a third option. Keep making those molecules and skim a few quick summaries on your phone over a coffee or a train ride. For that we have you covered. Much like Disney sells the same kid’s movies to new a new batch of kids every 4 years, it’s time to recycle and highlight some content we’ve written in the past while adding a few of our favorite perspectives from the literature tutorials on topics we haven’t had a chance to write about before. Why do this? Mainly, because we’re proud of what we’ve written in the past and we think some of you might find it useful. So, if you already know everything there is to know about photochemistry perhaps this post isn’t for you, and you would like to peruse some advanced photochemistry topics. For everyone else here’s a quick look at an introduction to photochemistry. Each of the following links can be read in less than the time it takes to drink a single cup of coffee.
Photochemistry 101:
When we (HepatoChem) started selling photoreactors around 2016, most of the photochemistry that we were interested in at the time was of the iridium and nickel variety, with a blue LED and not much else. Had things simply stopped there, we probably wouldn’t still be selling photoreactors and the field would have gotten quite boring. Instead, things have progressed faster and farther than we could ever imagine with new chemistry, new wavelengths, new products, and endless possibilities. Our first few links here set out to lay out some simple fundamentals of photochemistry for a new and growing audience.
• Photochemistry 101, Part I: Everything You Need To Know To Get Started
• Photochemistry 101, Part II: Understanding and Measuring Light Sources
• Photochemistry 101, Part III: Setting Up Your Initial Photochemistry Reactions
Photochemistry 201:
Once we started making our own LEDs, we spent some time learning what exactly was going on inside those LEDs we were selling. Where do LEDs come from? How do LEDs exist in so many colors, what’s going on inside? We learned a lot about the rare earth metals that exist inside and spent some time discussing it all in a blog post.
• How do they make that LED that color?
A few questions in the literature about commercial photoreactor designs prompted us to test out a few reactions in our PhotoRedox Boxes™ and put together our thoughts on the topic of best practices for comparing photoreactors. For this one, probably need to choose a larger coffee.
• Comparing Commercial Photoreactors
The launch of our advanced photoreactor the Lucent360™ prompted us to get a little sentimental and discuss the history of Photoreactor design at Hepatochem and our company in general.
Photochemistry 301
We have written about many topics over the years in our blog discussing some of our favorite papers of the weird and unexpected variety ranging from photocatalysis with flower extracts, Fenton Boats and Seawater as a reaction solvent. We try to cover as broad a range as possible although a few important topics have gone criminally unrepresented. Whether we could never quite find the right paper to discuss, didn’t have necessary background to explain it or just felt readers would be better off reading the full paper for themselves a few important topics have been missed. For that we thought we would add a few quick tutorials and perspectives to this post.
We have been looking to write about enantioselective photochemistry for quick some time. It’s really one of the most elegant extensions of the field of photocatalysis in recent years and has been on the shortlist for newsletter topics for quite some time. This quick recent perspective by Xuemeng Chen and Soren Kramer gives a far better introduction and outlook on enantioselective functionalization with photochemistry than we could ever hope to summarize for ourselves. So, for that, we recommend that you read the whole thing…
• Photoinduced transition-metal-catalyzed enantioselective functionalization of non-acidic C(sp3)-H bonds (Open Access)
As we start to dabble in photobiocatalysis (more on this to come soon) we’ve been reading a bit more on this topic that we’ve never really taken any time to discuss. If you are new to the field and want a quick start into some interesting photobiocatalyzed reactions, this recent work by Christoph Winkler at the University of Graz and an army of coworkers is worth a read.
• Exciting Enzymes: Current State and Future Perspective of Photobiocatalysis (Open Access)
We get a lot of requests from polymer chemists regarding PhotoRedox Boxes™ and PhotoRedox Box TC™ (Temperature Controlled) reactors to do photoinitiated polymerization and depolymerization reactions. And while we acknowledge that it’s an incredibly important field, it has been underrepresented in our monthly topics. This recent minireview by Fabian Eisenreich looks at the fundamentals behind photocatalysis in depolymerization reactions. A great read to get an overview of the field.
• Photocatalysis as an Effective Tool for Upcycling Polymers into Value-Added Molecules (Open Access)
Thanks for reading or skimming our list of topics and hopefully you clicked through to a few that caught your eye. If you have a topic or paper, you think we should discuss send your comments to info@hepatochem.com.
