Team Nickel continues to be hard at work during this challenging summer, and today we report the latest chapter in our work towards diverse regiodivergent alkene functionalization in collaboration with Liu group at the University of Pittsburgh. Specifically, we discovered that a systematically tuned Pyrox ligand is able to overcome the inherent tendency of alkenyl carboxylic acids to react in an anti-Markovnikov fashion in nickel(0)-catalyzed hydroarylation and -alkenylation with oranoboronic acids, instead favoring formation of the anti-Markovnikov product. Great work by all of the authors—Zi-Qi, Ruohan, Van, and Yang from our group, and Yue from the Liu lab.

For a link to the pre-print, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/articles/preprint/Ligand-Controlled_Regiodivergence_in_Nickel-Catalyzed_Hydroarylation_and_Hydroalkenylation_of_Alkenyl_Carboxylic_Acids/12650009