The article Palladium-Catalyzed Direct Carboxylation of Aryl Bromides with Carbon Dioxide, coauthored by Ruben Martín and Arkaitz Correa, and published in J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2009, 131, 15974-15975, has been selected by the Editorial Board of SYNFACTS for its important insights.

In this work, the authors report a direct carboxylation process which proceeds with a high tolerance towards diverse functional groups and can thus be applied to a broad range of substrates. This method, contrary to other carboxylation protocols, avoids the use of organometallic intermediate species, which is advantageous in terms of atom economy.