The inventions of gunpowder, Teflon, penicillin that were completed accidental took the world by storm.
A study published in the journal science covers how electricity is used to develop a tool that may make it easier and inexpensive to manufacture compounds used in pharmaceutical formulations and other natural products. The invention is an addition to several unanticipated innovations that occurred earlier.
A research associate involved in the study at The Ohio State University was earlier part of a team that originally sought to develop a catalyst that could be initiated by electricity to make bonds of targeted drug compounds.
The findings of the study suggests general guideline for using inexpensive and abundantly available materials, and use them to create complex compounds that are normally not compatible with each other. The streamline of this chemical process could enable researchers to fabricate more valuable products safely in lesser steps and less waste.
Meanwhile, the research team used the power of electricity to actually facilitate chemical reactions in the laboratory instead of using high power reagents or added substances what is common for synthesizing materials.
The ecological sustainability of electricity accounts for a recent push in the industrial sector to move toward the utilization of electrochemistry to nurture chemical change.
The use of electricity is very attractive for chemistry these days due to total control on how the reactions are performed.
Importantly, the research has broad applications in medicine, and in the creation of products such as agrichemicals and certain plastics. Seemingly serendipitous, the discovery is a result of lot of hard work and patience.
In fact, this involved probably three months of testing of different combinations of additives until something worked to be phenomenal.