Research
The manifold areas of our research
- Reactive Intermediate and Prebiotic Chemistry
- Singlet carbenes incorporating a divalent carbon atom (R–C–R’) have grown from laboratory curiosities and theoreticians’ pet peeves into reagents in the growing field of stable (i.e., heterocyclic) carbene chemistry. Still, the experimental characterization of many other simple yet fundamentally important reactive species such as alkyl- or hydroxycarbenes, silylenes or sulfenes is hampered by their high reactivity or lack of precursors: Hydroxycarbenes, for instance, have been an unknown class of compounds until 2008, when our group reported the synthesis and characterization of hydroxymethylene (H–C–OH), whose preparation has been challenging organic chemists for more than 80 years. The reaction of hydroxycarbene with formaldehyde would be a source of simple sugars (the so-called “formose reaction” in the origin of life theory). Considerable efforts are ongoing to understand the formation and distribution of a wide variety of simple organics in extraterrestrial environments, and the examination of the structures and reactivities of prototypes such as various hydroxycarbenes, simple carboxylic acids or seemingly "exotic" heteroatom-containing compounds may also provide glimpses of the prebiotic earth.
