The palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reaction between different types of organoboron compounds and various organic halides or triflates in the presence of base provides a powerful and general methodology for the formation of carboncarbon bonds. The Csp 2 B compounds (such as aryl-and 1-alkenylboron derivatives) and Csp 3 B compounds (alkylboron compounds) readily cross-couple with organic electrophiles to give coupled products selectively in high yields. Recently, the CspB compounds (1-alkynylboron derivatives) have been also observed to react with organic electrophiles to produce expected cross-coupled products. The overview of some of such coupling reactions is discussed here in this article.
Ç IntroductionCarboncarbon bond formation reactions are important processes in chemistry, because they provide key steps in building complex, bioactive molecules developed as pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. They are also vital in developing a new generation of ingeniously designed organic materials with novel electronic, optical, or mechanical properties, likely to play a significant role in the burgeoning area of nanotechnology.During the past 40 years, most important carboncarbon bond-forming methodologies have involved using transition metals to mediate the reactions in a controlled and selective manner. The palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reaction between different types of organoboron compounds and various organic electrophiles including halides or triflates in the presence of base provides a powerful and general methodology for the formation of carboncarbon bonds. Here, some representatives of such reactions are shown in Scheme 1. Numbers in parentheses indicate the years first reported by our group.As one defect of the reaction, one would point out the use of bases. However, the difficulty could be overcome by using suitable solvent systems and adequate bases. Consequently, these coupling reactions have been actively utilized not only in academic laboratories but also in industrial processes. In this paper, three topics, routes to conjugated alkadienes, application to biaryls, and B-alkyl-borane coupling will be discussed. In addition, recent topics will be introduced.Such coupling reactions offer several advantages: (1) Ready availability of reactants. Cross-coupling reactions between vinylic boranes and vinylic halides were not reported to proceed smoothly in the presence of only palladium catalysts. During the initial stage of our exploration, we postulated that a drawback of the coupling is caused by the following aspects of the mechanism. The common mechanism of transition-metal-catalyzed coupling reactions of organometallic compounds with organic halides involves sequential (a) oxidative addition, (b) transmetalation, and (c) reductive elimination.1 It appeared that one of the major reasons that 1-alkenylboranes cannot react with 1-alkenyl halides is step (b). The transmetalation process between RMX (M = transition metal, X = halogen) and organoboranes does not occur readily because of the wea...