The latest paper from Team Nickel is now in press in Organic Letters. In this project, former visiting student Roman teamed up with current graduate student Omar to expand carbonyl-directed alkene 1,2-diarylation (previously demonstrated with amides and carboxylates) to even more challenging alkenyl ketones. Suppressing unwanted alkene isomerization proved to be challenging due to the acidity of the α-C–H bonds, requiring exhaustive (and exhausting!) reaction optimization. We performed a series of mechanistic experiments which collectively support L-type carbonyl coordination, and we compared the efficiency of these reaction conditions to those from related methods across three different substrate families to better understand the similarities and differences. Congrats to the whole team, which (in addition to Roman and Omar) includes Joe, Malkanthi, Zi-Qi, Van, and our BMS collaborator Steve.

For a link to the paper, click here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.orglett.1c01447,

As a reminder, an earlier version of this manuscript appeared as a pre-print back in March: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/60c755b19abda2146bf8e413