Prof. Mengchun Ye's group has developed the first example of highly para-selective arylation of monosubstituted simple arene with arylboronic acid. The use of amide ligands, especially DMF, is critical for the high selectivity in the presence of cationic palladium catalyst and NFSI oxidant. The current ligand control strategy provides a new choice for the development of selective C–H functionalizations of nonchelate-assisted simple arenes, which could be potentially applicable to other types of coupling reactions. A main limitation for current method is the requirement for a large excess of arene substrate and amide ligand, which means further efforts to search more powerful catalyst system need to be made in the future.

Link: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.6b12907