Do we really want clickbait headlines in the science community?
Disease caused by silent mutation! This one breaks all the known rules of protein synthesis. (Hemophilia B)
I did my best to read through it, but I am not a chemistry buff, so this is my best attempt at explaining it. In molecules, the bonds between atoms can be single, double or triple, but it was a stated rule that double bonds only formed in 2D molecules. This discovery proves that is not the case and a double bonded atom can indeed take a 3D shape. With this limit removed in the shapes molecules can take. This is an opening for a huge jump in medicine and other chemistry related discoveries/creations as the set of tools chemists have to play with opened up just a little further.
I am a chemistry buff and also had a look at the original research paper. Aticle is open acess if anyone is interested https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-025-02055-9. So here is the way too long explanation.
Sadly no, they didn’t discover an entirely new class of double bonds that are stable in this bent configuration. Instead those bent double bonds are very reactive and therefore can’t exist for very long. But they are reactive in a specific way that proved useful for attaching those big 3D shapes to something else in interesting ways. That means that the double bonds are “used up” in the reaction and are no longer present in the new molecules they made.
The clickbait headline in general just puts way too much emphasis on the unusual double bonds. It is not a new concept in organic chemistry at all that double bonds can be strained (=bent out of plane) and that they become more reactive when they are. The perfectly flat case is just the most stable geometry for double bonds, which makes it more difficult to have molecules that force them to be bent. Because of this the bonds in this case could also be more accurately described as one-and-a-half bonds than “true” double bonds.
Brendt’s rule (roughly, that you cannot have molecules where double bonds are strained this much) was not considered an unbreakable “principle that had stood for more than a century” at all. The first counter examples, including the ones in the article, already popped up in the eigthies, around 60 years after he established that rule. The remaining of the article actually represents the research paper pretty accurately, just the headline and first two paragraphs are heavily sensationalized.
TLDR: The molecules in the article are just two pretty extreme cases of bent double bonds that have been known for decades. The researches here “just” (this is still impressive work) managed to use these weird edge cases of double bonds for some interesting new reactions that provide a shortcut to structures that would be a pain to synthesize in another way. Is this actually immediately useful for drug discovery? Maybe. Someone made some interesting new shapes in an easier way for other scientists to play around with. Maybe that helps with something, maybe it does not. But now we have one more tool in the chemistry toolbox to try and make new helpful molecules.
Appreciate an expert’s input. So this is not so much a new discovery as a new method of creating these 3D double bonds that were previously a much bigger pain to create. That is progress, but not the “new frontier” level progress the article tries to sell you on.
This is an opening for a huge jump in medicine and other chemistry related discoveries/creations
Yes and no, this is giving more possibilities. There’s no strong indication that these will actually be useful in those fields. But yes, it’s always cool to have a new class of shapes to play with.
Are they allowed to just overturn the rules of chemistry like that? Won’t that make the universe get wonky?!
i was having a fine day, until scientists overturned gravity, now I’m stuck on the ceiling.
reality warping.
In 2024, a research group led by UCLA chemist Neil Garg overturned Bredt’s rule, a principle that had stood for more than a century. The rule states that molecules cannot form a carbon-carbon double bond at the “bridgehead” position (the ring junction of a bridged bicyclic molecule). Building on that breakthrough, Garg’s team has now developed methods to create even stranger structures: cage-shaped molecules known as cubene and quadricyclene that contain highly unusual double bonds.
I wouldn’t call it so disruptive. I mean, sure this is a great discovery in the field of organic chemistry and will allow producing new molecules. But it’s not like this gets us into a paradigm shift or anything like that, this still builds within the framework of Quantum Mechanics and is not something that was previously believed theoretically impossible. It is something quite amazing that they pulled it off and it will open up new possibilities in the drug discovery field.
I’ll be waiting for molecules with such moieties to show up in commercial provider catalogues in the following years.
