Lucas Gregor is this years recipient of the Examenspreis for chemistry students at FSU Jena. A well-deserved honor for Lucas. Congratulations! You make us proud!

We open the lab doors to everyone curious about science… Nov 22nd from 6 pm till midnight. This year you can engage all the senses: see, smell, hear, touch and even taste the chemistry! More details at www.lndw-jena.de.

One would think that alcohols easily undergo allylation using MBH electrophiles. They don’t! Unless you give them a push with latent pronucleophiles. Read about it in Synlett (via the link on our publications page). Congrats on another publication for Markus and Abdulrahman who equally contributed to this study.

Welcome to the group Oliver! Good luck with your latent pronucleophiles. We hope they behave well in your hands.

Lenard has successfully finished his BSc studies in our group and defended his thesis. We wish him all the best for the MSc studies!

Lena was selected as the finalist of the 2024 UKRAINET PhD Thesis Presentation Contest in Saarbrücken this year. Her presentation was as impressive as always and she deservedly won the competition. Congrats Lena!

To enjoy the last warm days of summer, our group visited the Feengrotten in Saalfeld and had a nice BBQ afterwards. Photos coming soon!

Jephtahlyn Genevieve Attoh from Ghana joins us for three months for his IAESTE internships. Welcome to Jena and good luck with your project!

Ginie has successfully finished her BSc studies in our group and defended her thesis. We wish her all the best for the MSc studies!

Welcome to the group Sebastian! Have fun and enjoy the chemistry of organophosphorus compounds.

Martin Guarini-Roman from Spain joins us for three months for his IAESTE internships. Welcome to Jena and good luck with your project!

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This month, our Ph.D. students Suresh, Olena and Milica are attending various conferences to present and share our work with the scientific community.

Suresh: 18th Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium in Liège, Belgium; ACS Publication Symposium: Catalysis for Organic Synthesis in Vienna, Austria

Olena and Milica: Balticum Organicum Syntheticum 2024 in Riga, Latvia

A collaborative effort reveals that mycofactocin oxidation is linked to respiration and that MftG plays a crucial role in alcohol metabolism in mycobacteria. Congrats to everyone involved! Read about it via the link on our publications page.

A great collaborative effort led by the group of Oliver Werz (FSU Jena) with the help of groups of Dagmar Fischer (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) and Tatu Pantsar (University of Eastern Finland) on bromo-substituted indirubins for inhibition of protein kinase-mediated signalling involved in inflammatory mediator release is now published in Bioorganic Chemistry. Congrats to everyone involved! Read about it via the link on our publications page.

Niklas is an old friend of ours from his BSc thesis days. He joins us again for his MSc thesis. This time he’s making a switch from total synthesis to photocatalysis (and a little bit of total synthesis if everything goes well). Good luck Niklas!

Welcome to the group Lenard! Good luck and have fun with Lewis base catalysis.

Welcome to the group Ginie! Good luck and have fun with photocatalysis.

With a wise choice of nucleophile, heteroarylphosphonium salts can help make C-C bonds too! Congrats to Fritz and Milica on another paper. Read about it via the link on our publications page.

To ensure a good start in the new year, Lena’s paper on the synthesis of beta-amino acid derivatives is now available in Chemistry – A European Journal. Well done Lena and thank you to Phil for his crystallography work! Read about it via the link on our publications page.

Marku’s work on sylil carbamates as latent pronucleophiles is now published in Organic Letters. Great work Markus, Lorenz and Lena! Read all about it via the link on our publications page

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The group celebrated the winter holidays together with a very Thuringian dinner and a local brewery tour. Stand by for the photos on our group photos page!