periodic awesomeness, fuck yeah!

I stumbled onto this beauty via Boing Boing today:

sold by Modern Toss, out of England (obviously)

I love the fact that it has a certain periodicity to it. The upper right 'element' "Tit" is about as light and unreactive as it gets, and the lower left has "You Stupid Fucking Arsehole Cunt" which is pretty fucking heavy. There is also a nice vertical trend, as well.

How they mismatched the example Cock and the actual Cock colors and values is beyond me, but the general product is excellent.

now that's GLOBAL deprotection

I stay the hell away from sugar chemistry. In fact as a general rule I try to not even read papers about it. It's not that I don't like it, it's that it scares the shit out of me.

Sugar chemistry is an odd field where it seems that chemistry from other common areas doesn't work, and chemistry that works in sugar chemistry doesn't always translate to general organic reactions well. The reactions within the field, unfortunately, don't always work either.

When I happened on this today, I would have otherwise skipped it except for the compelling graphical abstract, that I have blown up here:

JOC ASAP

These guys took off 21 TBS protecting groups all at once. I gather from the text this may not be all that unusual, but it sure surprised me, especially when it is presented in visual form. The overall yield was ~28% which is an average of ~94% per protecting group. I have, unfortunately, had a lot of worse yields in taking a single protecting group off of a robust molecule in the past.

Sure puts a total synthesis "global deprotection" in a different light for me. Kudos to the sugar chemists, you insane fuckers.