Bridging protein crystallography and chemistry: structural insight into the O-GlcNAc modification and the structure-inspired design of chemical probes

Abstract

The history of solid-state reactions goes back to the nineteenth century, however it was considered as “nature curiosity”. The first and most intensive investigated type of solid-state reactions was photochemical reactions. The work done at the Weizmann Institute of Science revealed the well-known “topochemical rules” that are being used also today. Solid-state thermal reactions were neglected and only few cases have been studied. The advantages of solidstate reactions over reactions carried out in solutions are the specificity of the reactions. Much work was devoted to the search for chemical systems that can undergo solid-state reactions, mainly photochemical reactions. In the beginning of the nineties of the last century effort was devoted to use solid-state photochemistry to enhance asymmetric syntheses. Recently the use of templates for solid-state photochemical reactions was successfully demonstrated. In the lecture, historical points in solid-state chemical reactions will be mentioned followed by significant contributions to the subject that will be described. Examples of the work done in our group on thermally activated solidstate reactions, photochemical reactions in neat compounds, and photochemical reactions in solid inclusion compounds will be shown. Important reactions are those that show single-crystal to single-crystal transformations. Those reactions enable monitoring of structural changes during the reaction as well as observing other interesting chemical and physical events. The most interesting systems will be described.