Exploring Metal Cooperativity in Selective Organic Synthesis

The development of efficient, safe, clean and operationally simple transformations is a primary challenge in modern synthetic chemistry. The goal of our research program is to discover and study new metal-catalyzed reactions with the aim to develop highly-selective, sustainable and atom-efficient synthetic methodologies based on the use of readily accessible materials and the minimization of waste production. In the last years we have been interested in exploiting the unique reactivity of copper complexes and diaryliodonium salts to develop selective catalytic arylation of phosphorous compounds. We also use cooperative bimetallic catalysis as a platform to develop synthetic alternatives to the classical cross-coupling reactions which employ stoichiometric amounts of organometallic reagents.

In this lecture, recent results on oxygen- and carbon-arylation of phosphonates towards the synthesis of biologically relevant compounds will be discussed. In the second part, different synthetic strategies to accomplish selective C-C and C-B bond formation based on synergistic bimetallic catalysis will be presented.