Research Projects

Nature has evolved with a rich diversity of organic molecules, and the creation of similar molecular architectures has been a longstanding fascination of chemists. For instance, Nature enables enzymes as versatile catalysts and provides a practical understanding, that superior performance is achieved by suitably positioning the substrate in close vicinity by collecting non-covalent interactions. In this context, the field of organocatalysis has become a focus of extensive research and brought the prospect of a complementary mode of catalysis with the potential for broader applications. Despite the tremendous achievements in this area, the scope of new chemical functionalities and scale-up opportunities remained relatively narrow. However, the choice of active site functionality and its mode of interaction with the substrate is vital. This necessitates proper design, ideal reaction parameters and the harmony between the solvents, reagents and catalysts. In this context, we propose to design suitable chemical functionalities to enhance the catalytic pocket via electrostatic effects, and strongly believe this methodology will offer a great impact in the field of organocatalysis to construct privileged chemical scaffolds. The objective of the proposal will be pursued through a series of Work Packages (WP). In WP1, we define our approach to develop new organocatalysts with electrostatic enhancement. In WP2 and 3, we discuss our focus reaction as the reversed regioselective annulation and multicomponent double Povarov reaction for the construction of fused cyclic scaffold such as julolidine and its derivatives, which has wider application from chemosensor, dye-sensitized solar cell, bioimaging, photoconductive materials and molecular rotor. In WP4, we plan to synthesis unusual amino acid employing tandem catalytic approach. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed julolidinone and unususal amino acids are not explored in the literature. The synthetic expertise for the proposed organocatalysts preparation and catalytic reaction is established within our laboratory.