Phys.org  October 7, 2024 The identity of a heteroatom within an aromatic ring influences the chemical properties of that heterocyclic compound. Chemists have recently introduced a flurry of editing methods to excise individual atoms from molecular frameworks and, in some cases, replace them with alternate functionality. However, systematically evaluating the effect of a single atom poses synthetic challenges, primarily because of thermodynamic mismatches in atomic exchange processes. Researchers in the Republic of Korea developed a photocatalytic strategy that swaps an oxygen atom of furan with a nitrogen group, directly converting the furan into a pyrrole analog in a single intermolecular […]