Ionic Liquids Containing the Sulfonyl Fluoride Moiety: Integrating Chemical Biology with Materials Design

Tuesday, 11 October 2022: 10:20
Room 303 (The Hilton Atlanta)
G. I. Anderson (Florida Gulf Coast University), P. C. Hillesheim (Ave Maria University), and A. Mirjafari (State University of New York at Oswego)
Research involving functionalized ionic liquids has become quite wide speared. They can serve as powerful tools to improve society, with a wide range of applications in medicine, science, and technology. As a SuFExable functionality, the sulfonyl fluoride has become widely adopted throughout the field of chemical biology due to its unique stability─reactivity pattern, highlighting the underappreciated potential of the S(VI)--F motif in ionic liquid design. For the first time, we have developed a new series of task-specific ionic liquids containing the sulfonyl fluoride motif -- a thermally stable and chemically robust functionality -- in gram-quantity scale. Significantly, inclusion of active pharmaceutical precursors and judicious variation of heterocyclic headgroups throughout the synthetic design process, resulted in structural diversity with a priori reduced ecological footprint. We employed a combination of molecular design, synthesis, computational modeling, and X-ray crystallographic studies for understanding of their structure-property relationships.