Fluorinated aromatics are used in drugs, agrochemicals, and in positron emission tomography tracers. Unfortunately, making carbon-fluorine bonds is hard and uses expensive palladium catalysts; for complex molecules it is harder still.

Now, Tobias Ritter and co-workers, Harvard University, USA, have remedied this situation and made it possible to fluorinate aryl groups, even in crowded molecules, using less-expensive silver to catalyze a cross-coupling reaction. Specifically, the team has proved the viability of the approach using silver oxide to catalyze the fluorination of aryl tin compounds with an electrophilic fluorine compound.

• Silver-Catalyzed Late-Stage Fluorination
  P. Tang, T. Furuya, T. Ritter,
  J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2010, 132(34), 12150-12154.
  DOI: 10.1021/ja105834t