Home

🔬 Title: Catalytic Hydrocyanation of Alkynes with HCN Surrogates: Advances and Challenges
👥 Authors: A. Zasada, D. Lichosyt*
🔗 Read the article: https://doi.org/10.1002/cctc.202501023

This invited review article, published in ChemCatChem as part of the special issue celebrating the 70th birthday of Professor Anna Trzeciak, presents recent developments in HCN-free hydrocyanation of alkynes, including both transition-metal-catalyzed and metal-free approaches.

The review focuses on:
✅ HCN surrogates: labile vs. stable, their reactivity and limitations
✅ Regio- and stereoselectivity control
✅ Unified graphical format for comparison of outcomes
✅ Methodologies enabling regiodivergence and stereodivergence
✅ Outlook on remaining challenges and open synthetic opportunities

👏 Congratulations to Ola Zasada, PhD student in our group, for her excellent contribution to this article — and for the design of the clear and visually engaging graphics.

🙏 This research was supported by the National Science Centre (NCN, Poland) under the SONATA grant, project no. 2020/39/D/ST4/01152.

Akram Hussain has joined the group as a postdoctoral researcher. We warmly welcome Akram and wish him every success in his research!

Angewandte Chemie International Edition has featured Dawid Lichosyt in its “Introducing…” profile series. The highlight accompanies his first article as submitting corresponding author, “Regioselective Hydrocyanation of Internal Alkynes Enabled by a Transition-Metal-Free Dual-Catalytic System”.

📄 Profile

📑 Original article

🔬 Title: Regioselective Hydrocyanation of Internal Alkynes Enabled by a Transition-Metal-Free Dual-Catalytic System
👥 Authors: A. Zasada, D. Lichosyt*
🔗 Read the article: https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202500940
🧪 Preprint version: https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2025-qhvvj

In this work, we report a transition-metal-free, highly regioselective hydrocyanation of internal alkynes using a dual-catalytic system, featuring:
✅ Broad substrate scope: 40 vinyl nitriles, including complex natural product derivatives
✅ Yields up to 97% and Z/E selectivity up to 20:1
✅ ~2500× cost reduction vs traditional TM-based methods
✅ Regioselectivity switch via catalyst modification (8 examples)
✅ Synthetic applications and mechanistic insight

🙏 This research was supported by the National Science Centre (NCN, Poland) under SONATA 16, no. 2020/39/D/ST4/01152.

👏 Congratulations to Ola Zasada on her first PhD publication!

We are proud to share that Ola Zasada, our PhD student, was selected to present her research at the annual IPC PAS Microsymposium 2025!

Ola presented a poster entitled “Regioselective Hydrocyanation of Internal Alkynes Enabled by a Transition-Metal-Free Dual-Catalytic System”, where she showcased our recent advancements in developing exclusively selective multicatalytic strategies for functionalizations of nonactivated alkynes.

Congratulations on a fruitful scientific discussion!

We are thrilled to announce that our latest research entitled ‘Regioselective Hydrocyanation of Internal Alkynes Enabled by a Transition-Metal-Free Dual-Catalytic System’ has been posted on ChemRxiv!

Our study presents a transition-metal-free dual-catalytic approach for regioselective hydrocyanation of non-activated alkynes. The methodology merges base-catalyzed alkyne-allene isomerization and phosphine-catalyzed HCN transfer, affording high chemo-, stereo-, and regioselectivity in synthesis of diverse vinyl nitriles in excellent yields, demonstrating broad functional group tolerance under mild conditions. A comparison with TM-based systems highlighted a 2500-fold cost reduction, as well as the elimination of the troublesome separation of the regioisomers!

Congratulations to Ola on her first PhD publication!

Check out the full preprint here: https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2025-qhvvj

Aleksandra Zasada has joined the group as a PhD student. We warmly welcome Aleksandra and wish her a great start to her research journey!