Indian chemist has key chemical reactions named after him

In modern Chemistry, names do matter, especially in pathbreaking chemical reactions or phenomenon.

Here is a sample of few chemical reactions -Grignard, Wittig & Barton, the Claisen condensation, Friedel-Crafts acylation, the Sharpless epoxidation, Grubbs olefin metathesis and Suzuki coupling.

These are all top scientists, discoverers or developers after whose names have been given to the reactions that they are identified with.. A few hundreds such reactions exist, especially in organic Chemistry.

DB Ramachary, a professor from the University of Hyderabad (UoH), has also joined this list with some outstanding research work in developing new and novel reactions.

The laboratory's contributions in terms of a slew of reactions are focused on using bio-friendly, amino acids as catalysts in developing novel approaches for drug development which is also sustainable as compared to chemical methods which use heavy metals like copper, Gold etc, which are both toxic and finite in resources, says Ramachary.

Some of these are the Ramachary Reductive Coupling, Ramachary-Bressy-Wang cycloaddition, Ramachary 2-Aminobuta 1,3 enyne catalysis, Ramachary Base Induced Ring Opening (BIRO) Reaction, Asymmetric Supramolecular-Organocatalysis: Ramachary, Organocatalytic Azide–Carbonyl [3+2]-Cycloaddition etc. are also routinely used in the US, Japan, UK, China, Germany etc.

During the 20th century, as organic chemistry developed, chemists started associating useful reactions with the names of the discoverers or developers.

Many chemists from different nations contributed to this privileged list . In 1934, Indian chemist, K Venkataraman also contributed through his reaction and that was named after him along with Wilson Baker as “Baker–Venkataraman rearrangement”.

During the past two decades, a few reactions developed in the Ramachary Lab at the School of Chemistry in UoH , have been recognised as highly useful for organic to medicinal to material chemists. Consequently, they have become well known organic reactions to be named after him.

“These findings have received wide attention among researchers world-wide; it is expected that they will pave way to utilize for the design and synthesis of new drugs, materials and natural products in more economical manner,” Ramachary told BusinessLine .

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