Trick, treat, or review? Just in time for Halloween 🎃 , we close out the month of October with two new review articles appearing online from the group. In the first article, which is in press in Tetrahedron, Mingyu and Juntao survey different strategies from the recent literature for generation and functionalization of C(alkenyl)–Pd intermediates in catalysis. These types of reactions constitute an increasingly versatile toolkit for accessing highly substituted alkenes in organic synthesis. This article is part of a special collection celebrating our colleague Prof. Dale Boger’s 2020 Tetrahedron Prize.

Click here for a link to the article in Tetrahedron: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040402021007985

The second review article appears in Chemical Review and offers a comprehensive overview of the area of metal-catalyzed, coordination-assisted C(sp³)–H activation reactions up to March 2020, when not-so-coincidentally the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown first started. It’s been a long journey since—over 100 pages and over 500 references—but we’re pleased to be able to share the fruits of our labor with the community. This review was written by Andrew and Camille in collaboration with Bin from Prof. Bing-Feng Shi’s group at Zhejiang University. Congrats to all of the authors of both articles!

Click here for a link to the article in Chemical Reviews: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.1c00519https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.1c00519

We have resumed our pumpkin carving tradition this year with potluck style festivities. Kudos to all of our artists performing phantastic in and out of the lab👏.

We are happy to share our most recent work with collaborators from Pfizer Oncology Medicinal Chemistry, appearing today as a pre-print in ChemRxiv, where we describe a versatile approach to carbo- and heterocycle synthesis from unactivated alkenes and ambiphilic organohalides. Under Pd(II)/Pd(IV) catalysis, the Wacker-type mechanism leads to net anti addition, which is distinct from classical Larock-type couplings. In this study, we systematically map structure–reactivity trends of the ambiphile, leading to unprecedented breath of reaction partners that can be employed. Congrats to everyone at Scripps (Hui-Qi, Phillippa, and Pranali), and Pfizer (Shouliang, Fen, Neal, Joyann, Michelle, and Indra) for a great team effort!

For a link to the pre-print, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/6172bcd10c0480fd773f44a4

We have a new visiting student Waraborn (she goes by “Por”). Por flew all the way across the Pacific ocean from Thailand and ready to explore Pd catalysis with Amit. Welcome Por!