Abstract
High-throughput experimentation (HTE) has accelerated academic and industrial chemical research in reaction development and drug discovery and has been broadly applied in many domains of organic chemistry1,2. However, application of HTE in electrosynthesis—an enabling tool for chemical synthesis—has been limited by a dearth of suitable standardized reactors3,4,5,6,7. Here we report the development of microelectronic devices, which are produced using standard nanofabrication techniques, to enable wireless electrosynthesis on the microlitre scale. These robust and inexpensive devices are powered by visible light and convert any traditional 96-well or 384-well plate into an electrochemical reactor. We validate the devices in oxidative, reductive and paired electrolysis and further apply them to achieve the library synthesis of biologically active compounds and accelerate the development of two electrosynthetic methodologies. We anticipate that, by simplifying the way electrochemical reactions are set up, this user-friendly solution will not only enhance the experience and efficiency of current practitioners but also substantially reduce the barrier for nonspecialists to enter the field of electrosynthesis, thus allowing the broader community of synthetic chemists to explore and benefit from new reactivities and synthetic strategies enabled by electrochemistry8,9,10,11,12.
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All data supporting the findings of this work are available in the paper and its Supplementary Information.
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Acknowledgements
Financial support was provided by the National Institutes of Health (R01GM130928), the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University (New Frontier Grant), the Cornell Center for Materials Research (DMR1719875) and the Cornell Ignite Innovation Acceleration programme. This work was performed in part at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), which was supported by the National Science Foundation grant NNCI-2025233. We thank S. B. Zacate for experimental assistance; Cornell NanoScale Facility staff for guidance and support with the fabrication process; D. Kalyani, D. Lehnherr and M. K. Wismer for helpful discussion; I. Keresztes for nuclear magnetic resonance data analysis; J. Liu and W. Yue for data reproduction; L. Baker for providing a photograph of the Legion electrochemistry system; and K. Meinhaus for copyediting the manuscript.
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S.L., P.L.M. and J.R. conceived the project. S.L. and P.L.M. supervised the project. B.G. and J.R. conducted all synthetic experiments. B.G., S.N. and Y.J. designed and manufactured the devices. B.G., J.R. and S.L. wrote the initial draft of the manuscript. S.N., Y.J. and P.L.M. assisted in writing and editing the manuscript.
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A US provisional patent (no. 63/592,209) was filed on the SPECS technology. S.L. and P.L.M. are commercializing the SPECS technology.
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Górski, B., Rein, J., Norris, S. et al. Light-harvesting microelectronic devices for wireless electrosynthesis. Nature 637, 354–361 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08373-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08373-1
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