Researchers at the University of Würzburg report in Nature Chemistry that they have prepared and isolated oxoboranes, long considered too unstable to study, using a surprisingly simple reaction.
Chemists at the University of Würzburg in Germany say they have produced and isolated oxoboranes, a family of molecules built around a triple bond between boron and oxygen that researchers have pursued since at least the early 1960s. According to the university's account of the work, the compounds had been trapped only under extreme conditions or inferred from indirect evidence, and were widely thought to be too unstable to handle in an ordinary laboratory. The study, published in Nature Chemistry, was led by Professor Holger Braunschweig, with computational support from a group led by Professor Ashwini K. Phukan at Tezpur University in India.
The result emerged from experiments that were heading in another direction. Two doctoral students, Lukas Lubczyk and Christian Markl, were independently reacting a compound called a diboracumulene with different ketones, common chemicals in organic synthesis, and each noticed distinctive orange or yellow solids. Oxoboranes turned out to be the main products, even though other outcomes had looked more likely. Using the approach, the team prepared three different oxoboranes, which it says suggests the method may extend to a wider range of such molecules. Braunschweig is quoted as saying that nearly everyone in the field had given up on these compounds.
The work builds on more than a decade of effort in Braunschweig's laboratory to make unusual boron bonds, including the first molecule with a boron-boron triple bond in 2012 and, in 2025, the first neutral molecule with a boron-carbon triple bond. The group is now testing how broadly the technique applies and whether similar strategies could yield other elusive compounds across the periodic table. Funding came from the German Research Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service and India's Department of Science and Technology. The details here are drawn from the university's materials as relayed by ScienceDaily; we have not independently reviewed the paper, and any practical uses of these molecules remain prospective.
