Interest in mutually exclusive pairs of bioorthogonal labeling reagents continues to drive the design of new compounds that are capable of fast and predictable reactions. The ability to easily modify S-, N-, and O-containing cyclooctynes (SNO-OCTs) enables electronic tuning of various SNO-OCTs to influence their cycloaddition rates with Type I–III dipoles. As opposed to optimizations based on just one specific dipole class, the electrophilicity of the alkynes in SNO-OCTs can be manipulated to achieve divergent reactivities and furnish mutually orthogonal dual ligation systems. Significant reaction rate enhancements of a difluorinated SNO-OCT derivative, as compared to the parent scaffold, were noted, with the second-order rate constant in cycloadditions with diazoacetamides exceeding 5.13 M–1 s–1. Computational and experimental studies were employed to inform the design of triple ligation systems that encompass three orthogonal reactivities. Finally, polar SNO-OCTs are rapidly internalized by mammalian cells and remain functional in the cytosol for live-cell labeling, highlighting their potential for diverse in vitro and in vivo applications.

Transition-metal-catalyzed nitrene transfer is a convenient method to introduce nitrogen into simple substrates through either alkene aziridination or C–H bond amination. Silver complexes have an unusual capability to accommodate a broad range of N-donor ligands and coordination geometries in catalysts competent for nitrene transfer. This behavior has resulted in the ability to achieve tunable chemoselectivity between aziridination and C–H bond amidation, as well as tunable site-selective functionalization between two different C–H bonds. In this paper, efforts to engage the diversity of silver and rhodium catalysts to accomplish selective and tunable aziridination of mixtures of alkenes are discussed. It was found that the selectivity of dinuclear Rh catalysts is dictated largely by steric effects, while the identity of the ligand on silver can be tuned to influence whether the steric or electronic features in the competing alkenes is the primary factor controlling which precursor is preferentially aziridinated.