We are so excited that our recent work demonstrating a powerful new approach to catalysis using metal/main-group bonds has been published in Angewandte Chemie! We show that an unsaturated Co=Si (cobalt silylene) linkage provides two distinct and orthogonal sites for substrate binding, allowing nitrene-group transfer from an organic azide to carbon monoxide while avoiding interference between the substrates since CO does not bind to silicon. Congrats to undergraduate students Wenlai Han ’23, Helen Jin-Lee ’23, Zach DiNardo ’22, Emma Watson ’23, and Jim Zhang ’18 for their fantastic work, and thanks to collaborator Prof. Dani Kohen!
