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Light wins uphill battle to solve enduring problem in organic synthesis

Mirror-image isomer blends have been converted into a single isomer by a light-activated copper catalyst — a challenging reaction that prevents the waste of materials.
By
  1. Wenzheng Fan

    1. Wenzheng Fan is in the New Cornerstone Science Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Organometallic Chemistry and Shanghai–Hong Kong Joint Laboratory in Chemical Synthesis, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200032, China.

  2. Guosheng Liu

    1. Guosheng Liu is in the New Cornerstone Science Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Organometallic Chemistry and Shanghai–Hong Kong Joint Laboratory in Chemical Synthesis, Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200032, China.

Imagine if all of the pairs of gloves produced by a factory were mixed together into a big pile, and you were asked to separate the left-handed gloves from the right-handed ones. Chemists face a similar problem when synthesizing chiral molecules that form mirror-image isomers (enantiomers) that, like left- and right-handed gloves, cannot be superimposed on each other. The existence of enantiomers is a headache for the pharmaceutical industry because these isomers can have vastly different biological effects, necessitating the scrupulous separation of enantiomers of drugs. Writing in Nature, Zhong et al.1 report light-activated catalysts that convert one-to-one mixtures of enantiomers (racemic mixtures) of compounds known as alkyl halides directly into a single enantiomer. This breakthrough offers a fresh approach for making single enantiomers of compounds that are widely used for chemical synthesis, with potential applications in drug discovery and the development of advanced materials.

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Nature 640, 42-44 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-00902-w

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Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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