Polymer-based surfaces for the promotion of C-C coupling through cooperative catalysis

Aldol reactions are important for C-C bond formation in chemical synthesis and have received significant attention in the upgrading of biomass-derived feedstocks. Industrially such reactions are catalyzed by simple alkaline bases such as NaOH and KOH. The choice of these catalyst although cheap comes with substantial negative environmental repercussions, high energy consumption, and waste treatment. In nature such reactions are catalyzed via a cooperative mechanism by enzymes at significantly milder reaction condition and with high selectivity, which avoids these limitations. However, the use of enzymes for such processes is industrially not cost competitive. Hence, the challenge is to incorporate key catalytic features inherent to enzymatic systems into heterogeneous catalysts, which can cooperatively promote these reactions. In the current talk I will highlight the main limitations of inducing cooperative catalytic interaction on heterogeneous surfaces. I will then describe our approaches for material design and synthetic methodology for tuning the active site properties on either composite polymer-based catalyst or supported metal-organic complexes.