Using a nickel catalyst and a commercial carbon-14 source, it is easy to radioactively label carboxylic acids, reports Nature Chemistry.

In drug development, it is important to know where in the body a drug ends up when it is administered to a patient. One way of doing this is to incorporate carbon isotopes (¹³C or ¹⁴C) into the pharmaceutically active molecule. Carbon forms the molecular backbone of almost all drugs and is therefore well suited to this type of labelling. The difficulty, however, lies in the labelling itself.