Carbon is a gregarious little atom, bending over backwards to link with a wide variety of elements in what is collectively referred to as organic chemistry. Life itself wouldn’t be possible without carbon’s knack for making connections.
Yet even this friendly fellow has its limits. Take Bredt’s rule for instance, which says stable two-laned connections known as covalent double bonds won’t form adjacent to any V-shaped bridges that happen to form across ‘bicyclic’ molecules.
Now a team of chemists from the University of California, Los Angeles has uncovered a solution that violates Bredt’s century-old rule. This encourages future drug research to explore the use of molecules that we thought could not exist.
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