Two birds with one metallic stone: single-pot catalysis of fundamentally different transformations.

Advances in metal catalysis have revolutionized organic synthesis, with the scope of metal-catalyzed reactions now covering nearly all areas of carbon-carbon, carbon-hydrogen, and carbon-heteroatom bond formation. For years, the goal was to develop catalysts that were highly selective for a single transformation. However, a promising current area of research is the use of a single catalyst to mediate more than one transformation in a selective manner. Whereas much early work was focused on using a catalyst for several similar transformations, recent investigations have shown that it is also possible to employ a single catalyst for several very different transformations in a single reaction sequence. This Minireview focuses on methods in which the mechanisms of the transformations are fundamentally very different.