Electrochemical Nickel Catalysis for Sp-Sp Cross-Electrophile Coupling Reactions of Unactivated Alkyl Halides.

A constant-current electrochemical method for reducing catalytic nickel complexes in sp-sp cross-electrophile coupling reactions has been developed. The electrochemical reduction provides reliable nickel catalyst activation and turnover and offers a tunable parameter for reaction optimization, in contrast to more standard activated metal powder reductants. The electrochemical reactions give yields (i.

New ligands for nickel catalysis from diverse pharmaceutical heterocycle libraries.

Ligands are essential for controlling the reactivity and selectivity of reactions catalysed by transition metals. Access to large phosphine ligand libraries has become an essential tool for the application of metal-catalysed reactions industrially, but these existing libraries are not well suited to new catalytic methods based on non-precious metals (for example, Ni, Cu and Fe). The development of the requisite nitrogen- and oxygen-based ligand libraries lags far behind that of the phosphines and the development of new libraries is anticipated to be time consuming.