New Catalytic Methods for Synthesizing Bioactive Compounds

By: Valeriy Cherepakhin

I am a third year graduate student in Dr. Travis J. Williams’ group in the Chemistry Department at USC. Our research group is concerned with scientific problems in the areas of catalysis, inorganic, and organic chemistry.

We focus on the development of environmentally friendly, sustainable catalytic chemical processes that have economic and ecological advantages over existing ones. More specifically, our ongoing projects are devoted to degradation and recovery of composite materials, conversion of CO2 into renewable fuels, and the development of new synthetic methods to manipulate hydrogen.

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Bioactive compounds are chemicals that possess the capability to affect a living organism in any way. Typically, they are used as drugs to cure, treat or prevent diseases, and therefore play an important role in our survival. Some of these compounds occur naturally in organisms, but many were created artificially through organic synthesis in chemistry labs.

Indole is a compound that gives rise to a range of bioactive molecules. For example, tryptophan is an essential amino acid and a constituent of most proteins; and serotonin is an important neurotransmitter in the nervous, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems. The structurally similar hormone melatonin regulates sleep and wakefulness in humans and animals.

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I am happy to have received the 2018 Sonosky Summer Fellowship this summer to conduct research on the catalytic synthesis of new indole derivatives that offer a class of new potentially bioactive compounds. Our current data show that it is possible to enable a reaction to give new compounds (A and B) with a high yield and selectivity. We are planning to investigate the scope of this new reaction to see if it is successful in the presence of other functional groups in substrate molecules.

The results obtained so far are important, since our method conveniently provides access to A and B in just one step, whereas traditional methods require multiple-step synthesis. The work opens the door to new, environmentally benign methods for fine chemical synthesis.

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In conclusion I would like to express my gratitude to a first year graduate student from our lab – Anju Nalikezhathu – who significantly contributed to this project.