{"id":782,"date":"2017-09-21T10:10:50","date_gmt":"2017-09-21T09:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk\/in-abstract\/?p=782"},"modified":"2017-12-05T10:22:53","modified_gmt":"2017-12-05T10:22:53","slug":"building-with-a-molecular-robot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk\/in-abstract\/building-with-a-molecular-robot\/","title":{"rendered":"Stereodivergent synthesis with a programmable molecular machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Building with a molecular robot<\/strong><\/p>\n

A \u2018molecular assembler\u2019 is a hypothetical futuristic concept for a \u2018nanobot\u2019 that is \u2018able to guide chemical reactions by positioning reactive molecules with atomic precision\u2019, originally proposed by the futurist K. Eric Drexler who was inspired by Richard P. Feynman\u2019s celebrated lecture \u2018There\u2019s Plenty of Room at the Bottom\u2019. Now scientists at the University of Manchester have developed a molecular robot that moves a substrate between different activating sites in order to achieve different product outcomes from chemical synthesis. The molecular robot can be programmed to selectively produce, in a sequential one-pot operation, any one of four possible diastereoisomers from a tandem reaction process, including compounds that cannot be made through conventional iminium-enamine organocatalysis. Each molecular robot manipulates a single substrate molecule, but the process is massively paralleled with more than a billion billion (i.e., 1018<\/sup>) molecular robots operating simultaneously.<\/p>\n

These first generation machines augur well for the future development of small-molecule robots that can be programmed to manipulate substrates to control synthesis in a form of mechanosynthesis (that is, the use of mechanical constraints to direct reactive molecules to specific molecular sites), in a manner reminiscent of the way that molecular construction is carried out in biology.<\/p>\n

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