Enones serve as versatile scaffolds in synthetic chemistry, enabling diverse transformations while exhibiting biologically relevant properties crucial for drug development. Herein, we report a ligand-enabled gold-catalyzed arylative Meyer-Schuster rearrangement employing readily available and stable propargylic acetates and aryl iodides under mild conditions. This method efficiently delivers α-arylated enones with a broad substrate scope and air-tolerant conditions, while avoiding the need for strong external oxidants or photocatalytic activation of aryl diazonium salts.
Du et al. (2025) studied this question.