Tandem Catalysis: Three Mechanistically Distinct Reactions from a Single Ruthenium Complex

Organometallic catalysts are traditionally designed and optimized to mediate a single reaction. As the number of applications that require combinatorial and other high-speed synthetic protocols increases, it will become desirable for catalysts to mediate multiple, mechanistically distinct transformations directly or upon simple modification. As an example of such a system, we demonstrate the ability of a single component precatalyst to mediate three different reactions to form well-defined block copolymers.