Designed bifunctional ligands in cooperative homogeneous gold catalysis

Abstract

Over the past two decades, homogeneous gold catalysis has experienced exponential development and contributed a plethora of highly valuable synthetic methods to the synthetic toolbox. Metal–ligand cooperative catalysis is a versatile strategy for achieving highly efficient and/or novel catalysis but has seldom been explored in gold chemistry. This minireview summarizes the progress we have made in developing remotely functionalized biaryl-2ylphosphine ligands and employing them in cooperative gold catalysis that achieves excellent catalytic efficiency or realizes previously unknown reactivities. This approach also provides new venues for implementing asymmetric gold catalysis.