Today, I am in a good mood, because I know that next week I am going to a conference! As much as I love looking at manuscripts and browsing through the literature for commissioning ideas, it will be good to be out of the office and listening to scientists talking about their work. Hopefully, I will get to meet and chat to a few as well! I will be staying in a little bed-and-breakfast in the evenings, and during the day I will attend talks by eminent chemists at the 22nd International Symposium: Synthesis in Organic Chemistry in Cambridge.

Is anyone else going to the meeting? If so leave a comment and I’ll make sure to look out for you. Or just come and say hello when you are there.

To highlight our chemistry content, the following protocols have been made open access until the end of July.

Protocols relating to metathesis:

Synthesis of N-heterocyclic carbene ligands and derived ruthenium olefin metathesis catalysts

Xavier Bantreil & Steven P Nolan

Synthesis of all-hydrocarbon stapled a-helical peptides by ring-closing olefin metathesis

Young-Woo Kim, Tom N Grossmann & Gregory L Verdine

Solid-phase synthesis of short a-helices stabilized by the hydrogen bond surrogate approach

Anupam Patgiri, Monica Z Menzenski, Andrew B Mahon & Paramjit S Arora

Olefin cross-metathesis-based approaches to furans: procedures for the preparation of di- and trisubstituted variants

Timothy J Donohoe, John F Bower & José A Basutto

Click chemistry

Alkyne-azide click reaction catalyzed by metallic copper under ultrasound

Pedro Cintas, Alessandro Barge, Silvia Tagliapietra, Luisa Boffa & Giancarlo Cravotto

More Click Chemistry protocols can be found here

Enzyme catalysed

Preparative scale Baeyer-Villiger biooxidation at high concentration using recombinant Escherichia coli and in situ substrate feeding and product removal process

Iris Hilker, Maria C Gutiérrez, Roland Furstoss, John Ward, Roland Wohlgemuth & Véronique Alphand

Other useful reactions

Pd-catalyzed Suzuki-Miyaura reactions of aryl halides using bulky biarylmonophosphine ligands

Ryan A Altman & Stephen L Buchwald

The partial reduction of electron-deficient pyrroles: procedures describing both Birch (Li/NH3) and ammonia-free (Li/DBB) conditions

Timothy J Donohoe & Rhian E Thomas

The use of the Ugi four-component condensation

Stefano Marcaccini & Tomás Torroba

Synthesis of specific reagents

A practical guide to the synthesis of dinitroindolinyl-caged neurotransmitters

Graham C R Ellis-Davies

A concise and scalable route to L-azidohomoalanine

Stefanie Roth, William C Drewe & Neil R Thomas

Analytical techniques

A method for concurrent diazomethane synthesis and substrate methylation in a 96-sample format

Lana S Barkawi & Jerry D Cohen

Methods for isolation, purification and structural elucidation of bioactive secondary metabolites from marine invertebrates

Sherif S Ebada, Ru Angelie Edrada, Wenhan Lin & Peter Proksch

Mosher ester analysis for the determination of absolute configuration of stereogenic (chiral) carbinol carbons Thomas R Hoye, Christopher S Jeffrey & Feng Shao