Two practical and complementary methods are reported for the synthesis of trifluoromethylated alkynes. The first one, a mix-and-stir process, is based on the oxidative trifluoromethylation of readily available and bench-stable copper acetylides while the second one, which displays a broad substrate scope and has several advantages over existing procedures, is based on the oxidative copper-catalyzed direct trifluoromethylation of terminal alkynes. Both reactions provide user-friendly processes for the synthesis of trifluoromethylated acetylenes which can be easily obtained from readily available starting materials.

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An efficient, broadly applicable, operationally simple, and divergent process for the transformation of imides into a range of carboxylic acid derivatives under mild conditions is reported. By simply using catalytic amounts of ytterbium(III) triflate as a Lewis acid promoter in the presence of alcohols, water, amines, or N, O-dimethylhydroxylamine, a broad range of imides is smoothly and readily converted to the corresponding esters, carboxylic acids, amides, and Weinreb amides in good yields. This method notably enables an easy cleavage of oxazolidinone-based auxiliaries.

This is not breaking news: copper acetylides, readily available polymeric rock-stable solids, have been known for more than a century to be unreactive species and piteous nucleophiles. This lack of reactivity actually makes them ideal alkyne transfer reagents that can be easily activated under mild oxidizing conditions. When treated with molecular oxygen in the presence of simple chelating nitrogen ligands such as TMEDA, phenanthroline or imidazole derivatives, they are smoothly oxidized to highly electrophilic species that formally behave like acetylenic carbocations and can therefore be used for the mild and practical alkynylation of a wide range of nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon nucleophiles.