Use of SiliaBond® Gels (Functionalized Silica Gels) in Organic Chemistry

François Béland, Ph.D, Director of Research & Development and Marketing,
SiliCycle® Inc.
1200, Ave St-Jean-Baptiste, suite 114, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
fbeland@silicycle.com

Solid supported reagents and scavengers are now being widely used in organic chemistry. These products facilitate the work of chemists by simplifying reactions and work-ups. For example, an excess of supported reagents can be used to drive a reaction to completion without having to worry about their removal by a lengthy purification procedure; a simple filtration will suffice. Also a solid supported scavenger can be used to remove selectively by-products from a reaction, thus eliminating the chromatography step.

SiliCycle ®offers a wide range of functionalized silica gels, gathered under the name SiliaBond®, for diverse applications in organic chemistry. Silica-based scavengers and reagents offer many advantages over their polystyrene counterparts: no swelling, solvent independence, temperature insensitive, fast kinetics, ease of handling (free flowing and no static charge), and high density of reactive sites.

The SiliaBond® product line will be presented along with specific applications: scavenging reactions, amide synthesis, and reductive amination among others.

Henk Lingeman, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
(h.lingeman@few.vu.nl)

Solid-phase extraction (SPE), nowadays, is one of the most popular sample preparation to clean and concentrate all kinds of samples. However, in order to obtain reliable and reproducible results, as well as high recoveries, the choice of the sorbent, the mode of SPE used, the order of the sample manipulation steps, the choice of the modifiers, and the pH of the sample and the various solutions are of major importance.

Using a few provocative questions:

- Aminopropyl-bonded sorbents are always a bad choice!

- Ion-exchange sorbents can perform miracles!

- Cyanopropyl-bonded sorbents can solve most of the problems!

- pH is the most critical parameter in SPE!