Organic electrosynthesis is a rapidly evolving field, providing powerful methods to assemble targets of interest in organic synthesis. Concerns around the scalability of electrochemical methods remain the biggest reason behind their scarce implementation in manufacturing routes for the pharmaceutical industry. To fill this gap, we report a workflow describing the key reaction parameters toward the successful scale-up of an organic electrosynthetic method from milligram to kilogram scale. The reaction used to demonstrate our workflow and scale-up in a flow setting was the oxidation of a thioether to its corresponding sulfone, a fragment of interest in an active pharmaceutical ingredient under development. The use of online flow nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, offline ion chromatography, cyclic voltammetry, and density functional theory calculations provided insight into the reaction mechanism and side reactions.

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Emission from charge recombination between radical cations and anions of a series of regioisomeric 1,4-, 1,3-, and 1,2-bis(phenylethynyl)benzenes (bPEBs) substituted by various electron donor and/or acceptor groups was measured during pulse radiolysis in benzene (Bz). The formation of bPEB in the excited singlet state ((1)bPEB*) can be attributed to the charge recombination between bPEB(*+) and bPEB(*-), which are initially generated from the radiolytic reaction. This mechanism is reasonably explained by the relationship between the annihilation enthalpy change (-DeltaH(o)) for the charge recombination of bPEB(*+) and bPEB(*-) and excitation energy of (1)bPEB*. Since the degree of the pi-conjugation in the S(1) state and HOMO-LUMO levels of bPEB change with the substitution pattern of phenylacetylene groups on the central benzene ring and the various kinds of donor and/or acceptor group, the fine-tuning of the emission color and intensity of bPEB can be easily carried out during pulse radiolysis in Bz. For donor-acceptor-substituted bPEB, it was found that the difference in the charge transfer conjugated pathways between donor and acceptor substituents (linear-, cross-, and "bent"-conjugated pathways) strongly influenced the HOMO-LUMO energy gap.

Herein, we describe an enantioselective Cu­(II)-catalyzed spiroannulation of N-Boc-iminooxindoles with allylsilanes where a significant positive nonlinear effect (NLE) is observed. EPR spectroscopic studies of the copper­(II) species present under synthetically relevant conditions reveal explicit spectroscopic evidence based on analysis of the metal center for the species responsible for the positive NLE in a metal-catalyzed system. EPR spectroscopy indicates that formation of a heterochiral ML2 species under scalemic conditions enriches the effective enantiopurity of the catalytically active species, leading to the asymmetric amplification observed in the spiroannulation. Mathematical analysis of the positive NLE reveals a high thermodynamic preference toward formation of the heterochiral ML2, which has a low relative reactivity when compared to the homochiral ML2.