Palladium- and Copper-Catalyzed Arylation of Carbon−Hydrogen Bonds

The transition-metal-catalyzed functionalization of C-H bonds is a powerful method for generating carbon-carbon bonds. Although significant advances to this field have been reported during the past decade, many challenges remain. First, most of the methods are substrate-specific and thus cannot be generalized. Second, conversions of unactivated (i.e., not benzylic or alpha to heteroatom) sp(3) C-H bonds to C-C bonds are rare, with most examples limited to t-butyl groups, a conversion that is inherently simple because there are no beta-hydrogens that can be eliminated. Finally, the palladium, rhodium, and ruthenium catalysts routinely used for the conversion of C-H bonds to C-C bonds are expensive.…