GLOWING beads could save chemists from having to undertake hundreds of tests
to find the best catalysts.
Scott Miller, a chemist at Boston College in Massachusetts and graduate
student Greg Copeland, wanted to find catalysts for a reaction called
acylation—important in the drugs industry—which happens to produce
acid as a by-product. So they took a molecule, which they knew glows blue in the
presence of acid, and fixed it to a bead of resin. They figured that if they
could also attach a catalyst, the bead would glow during the reaction: the more
effective the catalyst, the brighter the glow.
The chemists tested their idea using four known catalysts on beads containing
the sensor molecule, all in a single container. Just as they expected, they
found the beads with the best catalyst glowed brightest and the worst stayed
dark (Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol 121, p 4306).
When used to hunt down new catalysts, the brightest beads can easily be
plucked out of the container for further study. James Morken, a chemist at the
University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, calls Miller’s work a “great
advance”.
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