Viewpoint: Reply to Comment on 'Using NMR to Test Molecular Mobility During a Chemical Reaction'

Abstract

Reports of boosted diffusion during chemical and enzymatic reactions have inspired a loyal community of scientists who find them so counter-intuitive that they must be artifact. This second Comment on the subject by these authors is about technicalities of how to analyze data we deposited online regarding J. Phys. Chem. Lett. (2021) 12, 2370 and Science (2020) 369, 537. Now that their own data is also online, one apparent discrepancy can be resolved: we demonstrate that the authors’ data agrees with ours because their first Comment on this subject reported only truncated short-time excerpts of the longer time series they deposited online (zenodo.org/record/4628353). This second Comment adds 5 additional objections, 4 of which are too technical to change the qualitative conclusion. The 5th objection errs because it omits to recognize intermediate states of the click reaction during which one reactant complexes with the catalyst to form an object of larger size. Elsewhere we analyzed in great detail the respective influences of boosted diffusion and this hydrodynamic effect (doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.14740563.v1). The factual evidence and reasoning in this Reply strongly support this laboratory’s earlier conclusions regarding boosted diffusion during common chemical reactions.