Event

Title: Emergent selectivity in complex stereoarrays

Abstract: Stereochemical editing has recently become a promising strategy for the synthesis of complex molecules. By enabling surgical alterations at a late synthetic stage, readily accessible substrates can be transformed into rare and valuable products. However, because many products contain stereoarrays of chemically similar groups, achieving precise control of site- and stereoselectivity is difficult. Typically, this challenge is addressed by reducing the kinetic complexity of the system: by using protecting groups to suppress reactivity at other sites (substrate control) or by using catalysts with tailored shapes to drive selectivity at the editing site (catalyst control). This talk proposes “network control,” a contrasting paradigm that exploits hidden interactions between rate constants to greatly amplify modest intrinsic biases and enable precise multi-site editing. When network complexity is treated as a scale parameter, the amplification effect can be viewed as a mesoscale phenomenon that emerges between the limiting regimes of kinetic control in simple chemical systems and metabolic regulation in complex biological systems. The concept of embracing kinetic complexity to engineer photochemically-driven selectivity landscapes should serve as a general framework for the design of next-generation stereochemical editing systems.

Bio: Alison Wendlandt is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alison is originally from Colorado, and received her B.S. from the University of Chicago and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin - Madison under the guidance of Shannon Stahl. Alison was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in the Jacobsen research group, until beginning her independent career at MIT in 2018. The Wendlandt group is interested in the development and mechanistic elucidation of new selective catalytic reactions.