Wow, where to begin, Our latest endeavors on the P(V) front are now published in Science. Now, before talking about the research, I must begin by giving a shout out upfront the (rather large) team who is responsible for everything in the paper. It was an incredible collaboration and everyone had a crucial role to play.   Bristol Myers Squibb: Yazhong Huang, Shenjie Qiu, Bin Zheng, Stephen Mercer, Richard Olson, Mike Schmidt, Ivar McDonald and Martin Eastgate TSRI: Wei Hao, Julien Vantourout, Natalia Padial, Javier Lopez, Rohan Narayan, Donna Blackmond  and Phil Baran Aft ..read more

ELECTRASYN 2.0 SOFTWARE UPDATE TO SUPPORT ALTERNATING POLARITY IN CONSTANT VOLTAGE REACTION MODE  Author information: Chuanjun Jiao, IKA Works, Inc. 3550 General Atomics Court, MS G02/321, San Diego, CA 92121-1122, United States Email: charles.jiao@ika.net   Note: This report is not related to the recently added new function “Rapid Alternating Polarity (rAP)”. The change described here is relevant only when the default “alternating polarity” function is used together with a reference electrode. Currently, only “alternating polarity” function is supported to be used with a reference e ..read more

Our two recent P(V)-based projects that were just published in JACS and ACS Central Science were a lesson of teamwork and sometimes “serendipity” that we would like to describe in the following blogpost.  Having worked on the P(V) reagent platform since its inception, I have spent a considerable amount of time sitting in front of the only NMR spectrometer at Scripps capable of detecting the 31P nucleus. Since these blog posts are supposed to be the behind the scenes version of papers we publish, I thought I would take this time to walk you through the fun journey from the ..read more

Our recently completed synthesis of tagetitoxin was just published in JACS. I think it’s safe to say that this work is unlike anything we’ve done before in our lab. This is true not only from the standpoint of the chemical problems presented to us (see the paper, the SI, and some of the stories below), but also from a team standpoint, for everyone on this project is actually very good friends, both in and out of the lab. We therefore decided to use the space below for each friend on the team to write a little bit about their experience working with this beast of a natural product. Warning ..read more

(From Baran lab grad students, opinions entirely our own and may not reflect Phil or Scripps) I was very proud of Phil & Donna, and the Scripps community today, for their thoughtful counterpoint to the alarming recently-published essay about the field of organic synthesis. It makes me happy to see my mentors stand up for what's right. And so, I was a bit startled, and more than a bit upset, when my inbox started filling with notes making accusations that this thoughtful counter-essay amounted to nothing more than 'hypocrisy.' A verbatim text message I received: "How can a slave-driver l ..read more

Dear Scripps Community, It is self-evident that these are unprecedented times. Compounding the stress we are all feeling, the Organic Chemistry community received a startling blow with an Essay recently published (and then rapidly taken down) in Angew. Chemie, one of our premier journals.  This topic we feel is appropriate for us to address. First, the Essay offers opinions that are not even relevant to the field of synthesis – odd given its title: “Organic synthesis—Where now?” is thirty years old. A reflection on the current state of affairs,”. How such a trea ..read more

This post comes from outside the Baran Lab, from our collaborator Dr. Jesse Sabatini. He was recently asked to comment on his experience looking for jobs during the last big economic downturn. That publication did not use the entirety of his comments but we believe there is a lot of interesting wisdom here that will hopefully be useful to the community. Thanks Jesse for letting us post this on OpenFlask! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ My Job Search Experience During the Great Recession Jesse J. Sabatin ..read more

Taxol! The fearsome jungle-gym-like structure of this molecule has attracted worldwide attention since the late 20th century. Our group was of course one of them, and has been working on this molecule for >10 years, which has culminated in this recent JACS article. PLEASE READ the SI because it describes what actually happened and rationalizes why/how we arrived at the final route; looking only at scheme 1 could give a false impression that everything worked as designed from the outset. It was the longest project run in the lab and I happened to be the last person. Here ..read more

Greetings fellow social isolationists. If you’re here, it may be because you spotted our recent synthesis of (–)-maximiscin in JACS, thanks for stopping by! If you’re looking for a harrowing tale of anguish, suffering and overcoming insurmountable odds, don’t worry the taxol blog post is coming soon. All jokes aside, this molecule was no pushover and it took some creative solutions to bring it across the finish line. Hopefully I can convince you of this, while providing a brief distraction from whatever you might be bingeing on Netflix. Are you not entertained? Befor ..read more

"It's just a peptide, how hard could it be?" That was Phil's remark in late 2017, when I set out to pursue the total synthesis of the alkaloid tryptorubin A. Fast forward two years and a bit, and the lab has published the molecule's synthesis (Download paper here). That means it's my turn to write another blog post, on topics (at least vaguely) related to that paper. A summary of the paper if you feel the manuscript is tl;dr, or you're behind a paywall: Tryptorubin A is a neat indole alkaloid. It's isolated from an interesting ternary symbiosis: Leaf-cutter ants pile up leaves to compost ..read more