Fe(ClO4)3· 6H2O: a mild and efficient catalyst for one-pot three component synthesis of β-acetamido carbonyl compounds under solvent-free conditions

A one-pot multi-component reaction for the synthesis of β-acetamido carbonyl compounds is reported. The reaction uses a variety of aldehydes, acetophenone derivatives or methyl acetoacetate, acetonitrile, and acetyl chloride in the presence of ferric perchlorate, a mild, efficient and inexpensive catalyst effective under solvent free conditions.     

Multiplexed Discrimination of Single Amino Acid Residues in Polypeptides in a Single SERS Hot Spot

The SERS‐based detection of protein sequences with single‐residue sensitivity suffers from signal dominance of aromatic amino acid residues and backbones, impeding detection of non‐aromatic amino acid residues. Herein, we trap a gold nanoparticle in a plasmonic nanohole to generate a single SERS hot spot for single‐molecule detection of 2 similar polypeptides (vasopressin and oxytocin) and 10 distinct amino acids that constitute the 2 polypeptides. Significantly, both aromatic and non‐aromatic amino acids are detected and discriminated at the single‐molecule level either at individual amino acid molecules or within the polypeptide chains. Correlated with molecular dynamics simulations, our results suggest that the signal dominance due to large spatial occupancy of aromatic rings of the polypeptide sidechains on gold surfaces can be overcome by the high localization of the single hot spot. The superior spectral and spatial discriminative power of our approach can be applied to single‐protein analysis, fingerprinting, and sequencing.