Electrosynthesis goes wireless

Driving organic reactions using electricity has gone mainstream over the past decade or so. But efforts to merge electrochemistry with high-throughput experimentation face a big limitation: wires. Lots of wires. High-throughput techniques are commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry to screen dozens or hundreds of reaction conditions at once or rapidly build compound libraries.

“If you do a 384 well plate, that means you need 768 electrodes and 768 wires to connect them all” to the power source, says Song Lin, whose research group at Cornell University works on organic electrochemistry. In 2021, Lin and his team collaborated with Merck scientists to design a reactor that could run 24 simultaneous electrochemical reactions. That reactor connected the cells in each of the plate’s four rows in series and used ribbon cables to minimize the number of individual wires. They didn’t want to stop there, but they knew that scaling up much further would mean confronting the wire problem in a bigger way.

So they teamed up with Cornell nanoscientist Paul McEuen to create wireless light-powered microelectronic devices that can turn nearly any well plate into an array of teeny-tiny electrochemical reactors, enabling truly high-throughput electrochemistry (Nature 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08373-1).

“You have everything you need for electrochemistry—the power source and the integrated electrodes—on the chip,” says Lin.

The researchers call the sesame seed–sized devices they developed SPECS, short for “small photoelectronics for electrochemical synthesis.” Inspired by solar cells, SPECS turn light into current that chemists can use to drive organic reactions. The current they deliver is proportional to the light intensity.

After testing their SPECS with a variety of known electrochemical reactions, the researchers turned the devices to exploring new chemistry. They used the devices to carry out combinatorial library synthesis with medicinally relevant building blocks and to screen conditions for two new coupling reactions.

Phil S. Baran of Scripps Research in California said in an email that he thinks the technology is “a landmark accomplishment in the field of synthetic organic electrochemistry” and praised the collaboration between the Lin and McEuen groups.

Lin says that SPECS are a testament to the innovations that can happen when researchers from different fields put their heads together. He and McEuen are working on commercializing SPECS through McEuen’s start-up, OWiC Technologies, so that more chemists can experiment with wireless electrochemistry.