Appearing online this week in Nature Catalysis, our De-Wei, Yang, and team describe an unusual CuH-catalyzed cascade reaction to transform terminal alkynes into enaptioenriched 1,1-aminoboron compounds in a single step. In addition to synthetic applications of this remarkable transformation, we examined its mechanistic underpinnings to understand the origins of reactivity and selectivity. Thanks to Huiling from Prof. Peng Liu’s group at the University of Pittsburgh for a great collaboration and our colleagues Jason and Brittany from the Automated Synthesis Facility at Scripps Research. In case anyone missed it, a pre-print of this work was deposited in ChemRxiv back in April (click here).

Click here for a link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41929-019-0384-6