COMMUNICATIONThis journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2012 J. Name., 2012, 00, 1-3 | 1 Alkylboronate esters are recognized as useful intermediates in organic synthesis because of their versatility and synthetic utility. 1 Significant research efforts have been devoted to the development of the efficient methods for the synthesis of alkylboron compounds. In this context, the transition metal-catalyzed boryl substitution reactions of alkyl halides have emerged as facile and efficient procedures for the preparation of alkylboronate compounds. Furthermore, these reactions generally exhibit high functional group compatibility compared with conventional organolithium/boron electrophile reactions. Marder et al. were the first group to report the use of a CuCl/PPh 3 /base catalyst system for the boryl substitution of alkyl halides. 2 Almost immediately after this publication, our own group reported the development of a CuCl/Xantphos/base catalyst system that showed similar high levels of activity towards the boryl substitution reactions of alkyl halides. 3 Following on from these early publications, several other methods have been reported for the boryl substitution of alkyl halides using a variety of different transition metal catalysts (e.g., Ni, Pd, Zn and Fe) (Scheme 1a). [4][5][6][7][8] Alkyl halides bearing a terminal alkene moieties can be converted to a variety of borylation products through three different reaction pathways, including the hydroboration of the terminal C=C double bond, 9 borylative cyclization 10 and boryl substitution of the C-X bond (Scheme 1b). Conventional hydroboration reactions allow for the selective reaction of an organoborane compound with a C=C double bond to give the corresponding alkylboron compounds containing a carbon-halogen bond. 9 We recently reported successive papers describing the exo-borylative cyclization reaction of alkyl halides bearing terminal alkene moieties using a CuCl/Xantphos/base catalyst system. 10,11 Despite the success of these researches, the development of a complementally copper-or transition metal-catalyzed reaction for the selective boryl substitution of alkyl halides bearing terminal alkene moieties has been limited. 10,12 In this paper, we have developed a new method for the carbon-halogen bond-selective boryl substitution of alkyl bromides bearing terminal alkene moieties by successful switching the product selectivity through the careful tuning of the catalyst and the ligand. Experimental mechanistic study has also been conducted to develop a thorough understanding of this novel transformation. The reaction of alkyl bromide bearing terminal alkene moieties 1a with bis(pinacolato)diboron (2) was selected as a model reaction to optimize the conditions for the selective copper(I)-catalyzed boryl substitution of alkyl halides bearing terminal alkene moieties, and we began by screening a series of different ligands (Table 1). The initial optimization reactions were performed in the presence of CuCl and a series of different ligands (5 mol %) with 1....