Ionic Liquids
This team efforts has been mainly centred on the discovery of new ionic liquids (ILs) such as the ones based on imidazolium cations containing pendant groups, guanidinium cations, chiral ILs derived from the combination of the guanidinium cation and readily available chiral anions, analogues of choline and more recently magnetic ionic liquids. The ILs synthesized in this laboratory has been applied by this team in a range of synthetic transformations, including asymmetric ones, enzymatic resolution and separation of alcohols, dissolution and transformation of biomass and, in collaboration with different research groups has been applied in different areas such as selective removal of dioxins, membranes for separation purpose, remove of drug abuse from hair samples and material chemistry. The toxicity of the ILs developed from this team was evaluated to human cell lines and their ecotoxicity towards the luminescent bacteria Vibrio fischeri.