On September 30th, 2019, Lv Jiahang, a 2014 graduate of Chemistry from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and a master's degree student in organic chemistry from Yangzhou University, currently co-cultivating PhD student by Yangzhou University and Nanjing University, published an academic paper entitled "Metal-free directed C–H bond activation and borylation" in Nature, a top academic journal in the world.
Lv Jiahang pointed out in the article that organoboron reagent is an important synthetic intermediate and plays a very important role in the construction of natural products, drugs and organic materials. The possibilities for synthesizing multiple substances based on organoboron reagents will greatly advance if we can find a simpler, gentler and more effective method for organoboron synthesis. In this paper, without using a metal catalyst, a targeted C–H activation method is shown for site-selective C–H boronization of aromatics and heteroaromatic hydrocarbons. BBr3 is used as a reagent and catalyst to obtain the compound by a mild method, that is oron c7 and c4 indole with extensive functional group compatibility, and the synthesized boron species have very large potential applications for downstream conversion into natural products and drug scaffolds.
