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DUAL CATALYSIS

Golden potential

Nature Chemistry volume 11, pages 760–761 (2019)Cite this article

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Due to the high oxidation potential of gold, the development of dual gold/photoredox-catalysed processes has been limited by the need for an easily reduced radical source. Now, discovery of an energy transfer photoexcitation process overcomes this limitation, enabling the oxidative addition of iodoalkynes onto organogold intermediates.

Over recent decades, gold has progressed from being an element believed to be largely inert, to one that has found immense utility in various classes of catalytic transformations1. In particular, the synergistic combination of photoredox catalysis with gold catalysis has been the subject of much interest in recent years, following the seminal reports by Frank Glorius and Dean Toste in 2013 and 20142,3. Such a dual catalytic system allows for the exploitation of the π-Lewis acidity of gold, in combination with the ability to access novel cross-coupling reactions via the Au(i)–Au(iii) redox couple. However, the high oxidation potential of gold(i) means that these methodologies have so far been limited by the need to adopt a radical source that can be readily reduced (for example, aryl diazonium salts) in order to access the gold(iii) oxidation state via sequential radical addition and single electron transfer. This limitation has been necessitated by the reluctance of commonly used gold complexes to undergo classical oxidative additions.

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Fig. 1: Mechanism of the dual gold- and photoredox-catalysed cross-coupling reaction.

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  1. Institute of Chemical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

    Euan B. McLean & Ai-Lan Lee

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  1. Euan B. McLean
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  2. Ai-Lan Lee
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Correspondence to Ai-Lan Lee.

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McLean, E.B., Lee, AL. Golden potential. Nat. Chem. 11, 760–761 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-019-0315-9

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