Accelerated Synthesis and Analysis of Lipids using Microdroplets

Two publications from this lab, in 2011 and 2012, used mass spectrometry to show that the rates of reactions in microdroplets are accelerated by many orders of magnitude. These experiments used ordinary organic solvents and demonstrated that acceleration occurs at the solution/air interface. These observations were then extended to a range of classical organic reactions. The Zare group then showed reaction acceleration in aqueous microdroplets, for oxidation and other reactions.
This presentation covers three topics. (i) The mechanism of acceleration which involves partial solvation at the interface (solvation is more important in the reagents than the transition state in bimolecular reactions, so increasing rate constants) as well as highly reactive species derived from H2O+.. (ii) The application of reaction acceleration in organic synthesis, both for scale-up (g/h) and for small-scale high-throughput reactions (1 Hz) for drug discovery. Thousands of new compounds are generated per hour allowing rapid screening, collection, and bioactivity testing of nanogram amounts of new drug analogs. (iii) The implications of accelerated microdroplet reactions for plausible prebiotic chemistry and the origin of homochiral life. Lipids are chosen to illustrate these analytical and synthetic capabilities.