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To mark the occasion of Nature Chemistry turning 10 years old, we asked scientists working in different areas of chemistry to tell us what they thought the most exciting, interesting or challenging aspects related to the development of their main field of research will be — here is what they said.

Lewis acids have recently been shown to enable stereocontrol in photochemical cycloadditions, a difficult task due to the reactivity of excited-state compounds. Here the authors show that chiral Brønsted acids are competent chromophore activators in [2+2] cycloadditions, forming diastereomers disfavored in similar Lewis acid catalyzed photochemical reactions.

While directing group-assisted ortho-B−H activation of o-carboranes is well established, meta-B−H functionalization remains rare. Here, the authors report an iridium(III)-catalyzed remote B(9)−H alkylation of o-carboranes using a nitrile-based directing template.

Though Ir-based dopants with ancillary ligands are attractive for realizing efficient organic light-emitting diodes, a strategy for designing these materials remains elusive. Here, the authors report a design strategy for heteroleptic triplet OLED emitters featuring functionalized ancillary ligands.

The limited operational stability of multi-resonance thermally activated delayed fluorescence emitters often constrains their practical application. Here, the authors report a direct correlation between device lifetime and Faradaic yield for oxidative degradation of emitter molecules.

Fused carbocycles are key structural elements of molecules in nature and they are often found in drugs and organic materials, but bicyclic systems containing six and seven-membered rings are difficult to prepare. Here, the authors functionalize an azulene skeleton that consists of fused five and seven-membered rings and carry out a ring expansion reaction to afford the desired bicycles.

A key difficulty to overcome in pyridinium salts functionalization is the regioselectivity at the two competing C2 and C4 sites. Here, the authors show bifunctional N-aminopyridinium salts reagents delivering both the aminyl radical and the pyridyl group to an olefin with C4-pyridyl regioselectivity.

The direct arylation of C–H bonds is an attractive synthetic step, but the reductive elimination of an organometallic catalyst carrying the desired C–H and aryl functionalities has remained challenging. Now, this step has been achieved by first oxidizing the iridium centre of the catalyst, which facilitates the arylation of arene C–H bonds of a range of substrates.

The direct, selective conversion of linear alkanes to α-olefins — without isomerization — is an important reaction in the field of catalysis from both a fundamental and industrial perspective. Now, a detailed pathway has been described for how a base metal can promote such a reaction with several turnovers, in a non-oxidative set of C–H activation reactions, thus preventing olefin isomerization.

Terminal Co^IV-oxo species are key intermediates in various cobalt-mediated oxidation reactions, but little is known about their chemical properties. Here the authors generate and isolate a mononuclear non-haem Co^IV-O complex and analyse its structure and reactivity towards a range of catalytic transformations.