Prokopchuk pins Palladium's activity on increased C-H acidification compared to Nickel
Citation: Lin, L.; Schramm, T. K.; Kucheryavy, P.; Lalancette, R. A.; Hansen, A.; Prokopchuk, D. E. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2025 , ASAP. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.5c07649 Summary Figure: Background: C-H functionalization reactions take unactivated carbon-hydrogen bonds (i.e., not very acidic, so not your average enolate) and typically use a transition metal to pull off that hydrogen. Theoretically, "any reaction that activates a carbon-hydrogen bond and makes a product" is an immensely wide net, so for the purposes of analyzing this paper, we'll restrict that towards organometallic reactions that end up forming a carbon-metal bond from a carbon-hydrogen bond. The paper has a really great introduction to the field, which I will briefly summarize, but I recommend reading through the second paragraph as it is well written. Palladium (and nickel, and other transition metals) often activate C-H bond through a directing group strategy. No...