Making Arenes React, Via Rhodium

Just Like Cooking has an overview of some interesting new chemistry from the Hartwig group. They're using a rhodium catalyst to directly functionalize aryl rings with silyl groups (which can be used in a number of transformations downstream). One nice thing is that the selectivities are basically the opposite of the direct borylation reactions, so this could open up some isomers that are otherwise difficult to come by. See Arr Oh makes a good point about the paper, too - it has a lot of detail in it and a lot of information. If you check out the Supplementary Information, there are about thirty pages of further details, and about sixty pages of spectral data. I particularly like the tables of various reaction conditions, hydrogen acceptors, and ligands. The main paper shows the conditions that work the best, but this gives you a chance to see under the hood at everything else that was tried. Every new methods paper should do this - in fact, every new methods paper should be required to do this. Good stuff.
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs