Discovery of more powerful ligands for Cu-catalyzed coupling of aryl halides with nucleophiles

 

Discovery of more powerful ligands for Cu-catalyzed coupling of aryl halides with nucleophiles

Date: 1^st November, 2024 (Friday)

Time: 2:30 - 3:30 pm (HKT)

Venue: Lecture Theatre P1, Chong Yuet Ming Chemistry Building

Prof. Dawei MA

 

Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry

Southern University of Science and Technology

Dr. Dawei Ma received his PhD in 1989 from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC), and did his postdoctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh and Mayo Clinic. He returned to SIOC in 1994, and was appointed as research professor in 1995. From 2001 to 2010 he was the director of State Key laboratory of Bioorganic and Natural Products. He also served as a deputy director of SIOC from 2011 to 2019. He is presently the chairman of scientific committee of SIOC and a chaired professor of Southern University of Science and Technology. His research interests currently focus on the development of new synthetic methodologies, the total synthesis of complex natural products and their SAR and action mode studies, as well as the discovery of small modulators for target proteins and special biological processes. He has received numerous scientific awards, which include Nien-Chu C. Yang Memorial Lectureship Award (2016), Arthur C. Cope Scholars Award (2018), Future Science Prize-Physical Sciences (2018), Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize of Chinese Academy of Sciences (2019) and Yao-Zeng Huang Award on Organometallic Chemistry (2021).

The past two decades have witnessed great progress in ligand-promoted copper-catalyzed arylation of nucleophiles. However, there still remain a lot of problems in this field. The most challenging problem is that less expensive aryl chlorides are inert for almost all Cu/ligand-catalyzed coupling reactions. Additionally, the catalytic loadings are still high in most cases. Recently, we found that some oxalic diamines and related amides are very powerful ligands for copper-catalyzed arylation of nucleophiles. These ligands not only make Cu-catalyzed coupling of (hetero)aryl chlorides with nucleophiles proceed smoothly under relatively mind conditions, but also lead to Cu-catalyzed coupling reactions with aryl bromides and iodides being conducted at low catalytic loadings and reaction temperatures. In this lecture, we wish to describe these results.