We bid farewell to Letian Xu who completed his half-year undergrad internship with us this week and is now headed back to Nankai University to write his senior thesis. Letian was a stellar contributor to two different research projects, working under the mentorship of G4 student Juntao Sun. We will miss you and your passion for Bayern Munich, Letian! Can’t wait to see what you accomplish in graduate school and beyond.

Appearing this week in ACS Catalysis, we report a method to access unique enantioenriched products containing a chiral C–N axis via C(Heteroaryl)–H activation. The reaction relies on the dual catalytic action of palladium(II) and an amino acid, the latter of which acts as chiral transient directing group (cTDG). Through a combination of density functional theory calculations, organometallic studies, and H/D exchange experiments, we showed that the role of the cTDG is to preferentially stabilize one of the two possible regioisomeric organopalladium species formed via C–H activation. Numerous classes of heterocycles are tolerated, and the synthetic utility of the products is demonstrated through various derivatizations, including a diastereoselective [4+2] cycloaddition. Congrats to Juntao, Yiyao, Wenji, Chen-Xi, Shenghua, and Quynh!

For a link to the paper in ACS Catalysis, click here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscatal.4c06788

As a reminder, an earlier version of this paper was published as a pre-print in ChemRxiv in November 2023: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/6541721bc573f893f1889f75