Selectivity in Tip-Induced Skeletal Editing via Heteroatom Substitution
Shantanu Mishra, Rasmus Svensson, Valentina Malave, Florian Albrecht, Manuel Vilas-Varela, Henrik Grönbeck, Leo Gross, Diego Peña · 2026
Read Selectivity in Tip-Induced Skeletal Editing via Heteroatom Substitution by Shantanu Mishra, Rasmus Svensson, Valentina Malave, Florian Albrecht, Manuel Vilas-Varela, Henrik Grönbeck, Leo Gross, Diego Peña (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13651514.txt.
Description
Shantanu Mishra and seven colleagues edit single molecules atom by atom with the tip of a scanning probe microscope. Skeletal editing rewrites a molecule's core framework late in a synthesis, and the team had already shown that voltage pulses could delete oxygen from a seven-membered ring or shrink the ring itself.
Swapping the ring's oxygen for sulfur changed the outcome decisively: pulses on the sulfur version mainly cut the sulfur out, with little of the rearrangement seen before. The result shows that picking the heteroatom during molecular design steers which edit the tip performs. The authors argue that pairing tip-induced chemistry with deliberate heteroatom choice gives a powerful strategy for building elusive ring systems one molecule at a time. They imagine uses in drug discovery and materials design.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Shantanu Mishra, Rasmus Svensson, Valentina Malave, Florian Albrecht, Manuel Vilas-Varela, Henrik Grönbeck, Leo Gross, Diego Peña |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 11 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |