This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Swapping out one letter in a word can entirely change its meaning. Similarly, swapping one atom in a molecule can completely change its identity.
A group of chemists at the University of Chicago has demonstrated a new way to make a single-atom edit to a molecule without changing any of its other components. The innovative method can be used to make a family of molecules known as pyrroles, including many widely used medicines, and is significantly simpler, faster and more cost-effective than previous processes. The inventors hope the method could help speed up the process of discovering new drugs.
"There are a lot of pyrroles that have never been made before, or have been made but are very expensive," said chemist and graduate student Abigail Bracken, co-first author of the paper published in Nature. "We hope this opens up possibilities for both research and drug discovery." Pyrroles are one of those things that most people haven't heard about but that quietly make life on Earth possible. For example, pyrroles form the basis of the heme that lets our blood carry oxygen and the chlorophyll that lets plants photosynthesize.
But they can be very difficult to synthesize in the laboratory, which limits how much experimentation can be done with them. However, pyrroles have a near-twin family of molecules: isoxazoles, another family of very common molecules whose makeups are almost identical except for a single atom. Where pyrroles have a carbon atom, isoxazoles have an oxygen atom.
And they are much, much easier to make in the laboratory. "For example, for one of the molecules we made, the isoxazole version costs $11 per gram, but the pyrrole version of that molecule is $2,000 per gram," said chemist and graduate student Alexa Lawrie, also a co-first author on the paper. Bracken and Lawrie are members of the laboratory of Prof.
Mark Levin, which specializes in finding ways to make big changes to molecules more easily—an approach they call "skeletal editing." Normally, if you'd like to make a new molecule, you have to start from scratch; the Levin lab designs techniques that allow scientists to quickly swap atoms in and out of existing molecules. The team set out to see if they could find a way to turn isoxazoles directly into pyrroles by swapping just a single atom. After rigorous trial and error, they discovered a technique that significantly cuts the number of required steps and shortens the process to just one to two days.
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