Comment on "Following Molecular Mobility during Chemical Reactions: No Evidence for Active Propulsion" and "Molecular...

We provide arguments why we consider as inaccurate two recent JACS Articles which disagree with our laboratory's report of boosted diffusion during the copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition (CuAAC) "click" reaction. In the first paper (DOI: 10.1021/jacs.1c09455), Fillbrook et al. claim that their diffusion NMR experiments offer no evidence for boosted diffusion, but we argue that their use of Gd³⁺-chelates to speed up NMR relaxations times is flawed conceptually, the authors interpreting Gd³⁺-chelates as inert. Actually, the same features that make gadolinium ions useful as contrast agents in magnetic resonance imaging render them unsuitable for diffusion NMR. Nonetheless, by correctly adjusting technical aspects of the measurements, we confirm boosted diffusion even in the presence of this MRI contrast agent. The second paper of which we are skeptical, by Rezaei-Ghaleh et al. (DOI: 10.1021/jacs.1c11754), makes comparisons to a reference state that is not physically meaningful.