Recently, the Ministry of Education issued certificates of the Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scientific Research of Colleges and Universities (Science & Technology), and the project "Research on Novel Organic Boron and Silicon Reactive Reagents" led by Prof. Chunming Cui of the State Key Laboratory of Elemento-organic Chemistry, Nankai University was awarded the first prize of Natural Science of the Ministry of Education in 2022 (main completion personnel: Chunming Cui, Jianfeng Li, Jianying Zhang), which was independently accomplished by Nankai University.

Organic compounds of boron and silicon have many unique properties, which greatly enhance the space of their organic compounds research and are widely used in the fields of life & health, national defense and aerospace. However, due to the lack of synthetic reagents and strategies for the construction of diverse boron-carbon and boron-elemental bonds, the variety and number of boron- and silicon-organic compounds are very limited and their structures are always single, which greatly restricts their applied research. Therefore, the development of new selective reagents for boron and silicon with abundant reactivity is of great theoretical and practical significance.

Chunming Cui's team has been working on the basic research of organic boron and silicon chemistry for more than 10 years, breaking through the traditional reagent research field and carrying out systematic research on the design, synthesis, structure and reaction rules of novel active reagents such as active organoboron-silicon multiple bonds, organosilane anions and silicane, as well as rare earth highly selective hydrogenation catalysts. They discovered a new bonding mode of boron and silicon and many new reactions of active agents, and the structure-activity relationship was systematically investigated. A new reaction network for constructing boron and silicon molecules with structural diversity was established, and a variety of new functional molecules of boron and silicon were successfully created accurately, which opened up a new direction for the research of boron and silicon reagents and provided a foundation for the further development of organic functional substances.

Breaking through the traditional scope of reagent research and carrying out systematic research on the design, synthesis, structure and reaction law of active organoboron and silicon multi-bonding, organosilicon negative ions and silibine and other active reagents with novel skeletons, as well as rare-earth and highly selective silicon hydride catalysts, and discovering new bonding modes of boron and silicon, and many new reactions of the active reagents, and analyzing the conformational relationships. We have discovered new bonding modes of boron and silicon and many new reactions of active reagents, and systematically investigated the conformational relationships, established a new reaction network for the construction of structurally diverse boron and silicon molecules, and successfully realized the precise creation of a variety of new boron and silicon functional molecules, which opens up a new direction in the study of boron and silicon reagents, and provides a basis for the further development of organic functional substances.