Master thesis in the Carell Group

We are seeking a highly motivated student to undertake a Master’s thesis or an OC-F Internship in the field
of organic chemistry. The project focuses on exploring a prebiotic synthetic route for the synthesis of sugars
as RNA building blocks.
Background. The formose reaction, discovered by Butlerov in 1861, is probably the most important prebiotic
synthetic route for sugars. He synthesised a complex of sugar mixture like aldoses, ketoses by polymerizing
formaldehyde under basic conditions with calcium hydroxide. The reaction starts with formaldehyde, which
can be produced from CO2 and H2O by photolysis. Mechanism of conversion formaldehyde to glycolaldehyde
is so far unknown. In the next step, glycolaldehyde can react with formaldehyde via an aldol condensation to
give the C3 sugar glyceraldehyde. Then this can isomerize to dihydroxyacetone and then next sugars can
be form by other aldol reactions and carbonyl migrations.
Due to low stereo and regioselectivity yield of ribose is less than 1%. Also, ribose is very unstable under the
strong basic conditions in formose reaction so because of these problems there are intensive work to find a
route to ribose production, because due to the simplicity of converting C1 to C6 molecules, it remains of great
role for the prebiotic research field.

Contact: Interested candidates are invited to apply with a CV to Szymon Drewniak (szymon.drewniak@cup.uni-muenchen.de).