NIA - Carbon Dioxide Activation and Valorisation at Copper-Phosphorus Bonds

二氧化碳（CO2）无处不在，对环境构成严重威胁。它也代表了一个机会——如果我们能把它变成有用的分子，比如塑料或药物，我们就能对抗它对环境的威胁，并利用它的广泛可用性为我们带来优势。一些化学家已经成功地利用二氧化碳将碳原子加入氮中。碳氮键在生命中非常普遍，所以这是一个胜利。在元素周期表中，氮在磷之上，这意味着它们的作用相似，磷碳键存在于生命中，但更重要的是，它对制造新分子非常有用。例如，“维蒂格反应”形式的磷碳键化学，以及依靠配体与磷碳键的催化作用，被用来制造各种有用的化合物。尽管磷-碳键提供了所有的潜力，并且它与氮有相似之处，但还没有人报道过一种从二氧化碳中催化生成碳-磷键的方法。我们认为我们能够做到这一点。在我们的小组中，我们研究了铜作为催化剂的可能性，它就像你口袋里的硬币一样便宜。催化剂是一种少量加入的化合物，可以使反应进行得更快。我们之前已经证明，铜可以催化一种与二氧化碳非常相似的分子形成磷碳键。我们想要研究如何将其扩展到二氧化碳中，并将其扩展到将碳氧键转化为碳氢键，这对化学更有用。

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is all around us, representing a grave environmental threat. It also represents an opportunity- if we can turn it into useful molecules like plastics or pharmaceuticals, we could fight its environmental threat and use its wide availability to our advantage. Some chemists have managed to use CO2 to add carbon atoms to nitrogen. Carbon-nitrogen bonds are incredibly common in life, so this is a triumph. Nitrogen is above phosphorus in the periodic table, this means they act similarly, and phosphorus-carbon bonds are present in life, but more importantly, really useful for making new molecules. For example, phosphorus-carbon bond chemistry in the form of the "Wittig Reaction", and catalysis relying on ligands with phosphorus carbon bonds are used to make all sorts of useful compounds.Despite all of the potential offered by phosphorus-carbon bonds, and its similarities to nitrogen, no one has yet reported a catalytic method to make carbon-phosphorus bonds from CO2. We think that we will be able to do this. In our group we investigate the possibility of copper as a catalyst, which is as inexpensive as the pennies in your pocket. A catalyst is a compound that is added in small amounts that makes a reaction go faster. We have previously shown that copper can catalyse the formation of phosphorus-carbon bonds from a molecule that is very similar to CO2. We want to investigate how we can extend this to carbon dioxide, and to expand it to transform the carbon oxygen bond into carbon hydrogen bonds, which are more useful for chemistry.