Themed collection Reviews & Highlights in Organic Chemistry Frontiers for 2014

New members in the family of organophosphorus compounds: convenient synthesis and reactivity of the 2-phosphaethynolate anion are highlighted.

Cycloaddition reactions are powerful tools in synthetic chemistry.

In this highlight, recent advances in the rational bottom-up chemical synthesis of three-dimensional (3-D) conjugated carbon nanostructures are presented.

Chopping of carbon–carbon bonds was very recently shown to be an efficient new strategy for the synthesis of organonitriles, as developed in this Highlight.

Chemical transformations via catalytic C–H bond activation have been established as one of the most powerful tools in organic synthetic chemistry. Transition-metal-catalyzed direct functionalization of β-C(sp³)–H bonds of carbonyl compounds has been developed in recent years. This highlight will focus on recent advances in this active area and their mechanisms are also discussed.

Multicomponent reaction (MCR) technology is now widely recognized for its impact on drug discovery projects and is strongly endorsed by industry as well as academia.

This Highlight discusses the most recent advances in catalytic fluorination of benzylic, allylic, and aliphatic unactivated C(sp³)–H bonds.

This highlight describes the state-of-the-art applications of appropriately designed heterogeneous chiral Brønsted acid catalysts and their applications in organic synthesis.

This highlight details the recent emergence of a new type of A³ reaction that features a redox-neutral C–H functionalization step.

Highlighted in this article are recent advances in C(sp²)–H and C(sp³)–H fluorination reactions.

Recent advances in direct fluorination of aromatic compounds by copper catalysts have been highlighted.

The plants of the Trigonostemon genus (Euphorbiaceae family) comprising about 50 species are mainly distributed in tropical and subtropical Asia.

Axially chiral allenes are an important class of molecules widely existing in nature and also valuable chiral building blocks for organic synthesis. With more and more new protocols for racemic allenes and new chiral ligands being developed, a wide variety of novel and challenging transformations have been recently unveiled for the synthesis of this type of highly versatile compounds. In this review, we present a critical account of the enantioselective synthesis of axially chiral allenes.

Metal-mediated organic reactions have become one of the great frontiers of organic synthesis.

This review focuses specially on the use of monodentate nitrogen-based directing group for C–H functionalization published during the past 2 years (2012–2013).

Parylenes are a class of organic compounds which have gained significant attention due to their application as coatings in areas such as medical devices and electronics.

This review highlights the frontier of carbon–carbon bond activation and discusses state-of-the-art methods for activating relatively unstrained bonds in homogeneous systems.

This review will focus on selected applications of Sonogashira coupling and subsequent transformations as key steps in the total synthesis of natural products.

This review summarizes the recent advances on the Pd(0)-catalyzed synthesis of organic halides, which involves the carbon halide reductive elimination as a key step in the catalytic cycle.

Enantioselective allylation is a highly used organic reaction to prepare chiral homoallylic alcohols and amines, which serve as important building blocks in the synthesis of a variety of natural products and pharmaceuticals.

Iron-catalyzed/mediated C–H bond oxidation has been demonstrated as one of practical and straightforward tools in synthetic chemistry.

Titanocene(III)-based approaches have been demonstrated to be useful in the straightforward syntheses of many natural products from readily available starting materials.