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Chemistry

A catalytic knight's move

Nature volume 441, pages 165–166 (2006)Cite this article

The reactivity of inert hydrocarbons can be transformed by a catalytic double act. With the ability to manipulate the lengths of the resulting carbon chains, this development opens up fresh vistas.

In chess, a knight's move can be formidable, because the implications of the combination of horizontal and diagonal motion are hard for an opponent to anticipate. Likewise, tandem reactions in chemistry are a combination of known reactions that provides an equally unexpected outcome. The power of this tandem strategy has been greatly enhanced by the use of homogeneous catalysis, in which soluble catalysts, typically metal compounds, are used to increase the rates and minimize the side-products of the individual reaction steps. In tandem catalysis1,2, two or more such catalytic reactions are combined.

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Figure 1: Individual steps of the Goldman–Brookhart reaction3.

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  1. the Department of Chemistry, Yale University, 225 Prospect Street, New Haven, 06511, Connecticut, USA

    Robert H. Crabtree

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  1. Robert H. Crabtree
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Crabtree, R. A catalytic knight's move. Nature 441, 165–166 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/441165a

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