Check out our latest work on late-stage functionalization of dehydroalanine-containing peptides. Under our mild photocatalytic manifold, we were able to selectively arylate a plethora of amino acids and peptides with modular arylthianthrenium salts in batch and in flow.

🌻Manfred T. Reetz, an organic chemist of the highest caliber, died of cancer on April 23, 2026. He was born on August 13, 1943, in Lower Silesia, now Poland, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1952. Reetz studied chemistry at University of Washington @UW and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor @UMich, where he received his master’s degree in 1967. He then returned to Germany and completed his PhD at the University of Göttingen @uniGoettingen in 1969 under Ulrich Schöllkopf, a student of Nobel laureate Georg Wittig. He subsequently moved to the University of Marburg to work with Reinhard W. Hoffmann, a former postdoc with Georg Wittig. Reetz habilitated in Marburg in 1974 and stayed there until 1991, interrupted by a short stint at the University of Bonn from 1978 to 1980. From 1991 to 2011, Reetz was a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr. As Managing Director, he also helped reshape the institute’s organizational structure. After his retirement, he continued his research, first at the University of Marburg and later both in Mülheim and at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At the beginning of his independent career, Reetz developed dyotropic and other rearrangements as tools in #OrganicSynthesis; later his group made innumerable contributions to the use of #organometallic chemistry in organic synthesis, with titanium as a central element. Starting in the 1990s, the final major chapter of his efforts was devoted to #biocatalysis. Manfred Reetz pioneered biological methods—directed evolution—as a tool to improve the performance of enzymes in stereoselective organic synthesis. He trained an army of excellent students and postdocs who went on to make their own careers. He received numerous awards, including the Karl Ziegler Prize of the GDCh @GDCh_aktuell, the Otto Hahn Prize, considered the highest award for chemists and physicists in Germany, and most recently in 2025, the Ryoji Noyori Award. Reetz was a member of a number of esteemed academies and he served the scientific community in manifold ways, not the least as a member of the GDCh Board. Manfred Reetz, a giant of organic chemistry, will be dearly missed by his former students and colleagues as well as by the wider scientific community.

I think Terrence Tao should be careful when talking about math

I really enjoyed speaking at the scale-up workshop in Oxford last February and recording a podcast with Jakob on our work on scaling up photochemical oxidations, along with some personal perspectives. You can find both here: youtube.com/watch?v=jBk0vb_k… youtube.com/watch?v=fY7xThUz…

Self-driving labs are transforming chemistry; but high cost & complexity limit access to a few well-funded labs. We wanted to change that. Our new paper in @NatureSynthesis introduces RoboChem-Flex 🧪🤖 🔗nature.com/articles/s44160-0… #selfdrivinglab #flowchemistry #optimization

If you an Early Career Researcher in synthetic organic chemistry and are interested in joining our laboratory, then consider applying for a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowships Scheme - link below! Colleagues, please RT. sites.research.unimelb.edu.a…

We are hiring. We are looking for post-doctoral fellow to join the group. If interested please contact me by email.

Last step...best step...Late stage oxygenation lets you edit complexity when it matters most! Check out our Angewandte with @arseniyadis . Many congrats to the whole team! doi.org/10.1002/anie.2025213…

📅Lutz Ackermann @aztul, Peter Gölitz, Dieter Kaufmann, and Oliver Reiser @chemieimalltag have organized an Armin de Meijere Memorial Symposium, “From Small Rings to Large Compounds” (program: l-i-c.org/news-events.html#2…), which will take place on May 22, 2026, at the University of Göttingen @uniGoettingen. Attendance is free for all, registration required (see program). Armin de Meijere (x.com/livesinchem/status/200…) was not only a highly respected, internationally renowned organic chemist, he was also a great supporter of the autobiography series “Lives in Chemistry” (l-i-c.org). Ryoji Noyori, for example, thanked him explicitly in his autobiography for a “careful reading of the manuscript” (l-i-c.org/1135).

We gave oxygen a complex sesquiterpenoid dimer..and let it decide what to do! Turns out, it rewrites the whole scaffold for the first total synthesis of macrocephadiolide A. Many congrats Kiki!!! pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs…

🌻Henning Hopf passed away on March 12 only three months after his 85th birthday x.com/livesinchem/status/199… A great organic chemist who had deeply cared about our community—a true “mensch”—has left us. Lives in Chemistry l-i-c.org lost a most insightful Advisory Board member who had enormously contributed to this endeavor from the beginning.

How to engineer photons in photochemical synthesis? Our Account examines wavelength, photon flux, and light intensity and how their control steers reactivity, informs reactor design, and predicts scale-up. If you’re interested, take a look: doi.org/10.1021/acs.accounts…

Iridium-Catalyzed Enantioselective Allylation of Alkynylboronates to Access Chiral 1,4-Dienes (@angew_chem): onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/….

Late-stage C–H functionalization offers new opportunities in drug discovery nature.com/articles/s41570-0…

⚡️We are happy to share our recent work in @angew_chem with a collaboration with Kim group at CNU. By adjusting electrochemical conditions, we access haliranium-mediated C–O bond or amidyl-radical-driven C–N bond formation, supported by CV, kinetic, and computational studies.

We just achieved the first site-selective cysteine functionalization with EBX reagents! @J_A_C_S pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jac…

📢 We are recruiting PhD candidates to join our dynamic research group at @UniofNottingham ! ⚗️🧪🧑‍🔬👩‍🔬💡 Check out our website silviresearch.com for more info and to find out how to apply! 👀

Excited to share that we have received the Hansen Family Award: Groundbreaking Research: Chemist Lutz Ackermann Receives Bayer Foundation’s Hansen Family Award | Bayer Foundation ⁦@uniGoettingen⁩ bayer-foundation.com/groundb…

Interested in cutting strong bonds in the presence of weak ones? Check out what Mn(PDP) catalysis can do when you change it’s mechanism of action @Nature (Advanced Article Preview) : nature.com/articles/s41586-0…

In @NatureSynthesis, we provide our perspective on the blossoming of organo-TT chemistry since 2019. From fundamentals to applications, we explain how the thianthrenium substituent enables chemistry that in part goes beyond that of other (pseudo)halides. rdcu.be/eIEM6

We built a machine learning–guided workflow to optimize reaction conditions for photochemical nickel-catalyzed cysteine arylation; no specialized robots or fancy HTE plates needed! Check it out @ChemRxiv: chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv… #MachineLearning #ReactionOptimization