The difficulty associated with the reactivity of perfluorinated molecular fragments, as compared to their congeners from the hydrocarbon world, often requires unusual synthetic methods and strategies. Therefore, new reagents based on hypervalent iodine(III) compounds have been developed to allow for the challenging electrophilic carbon-carbon or carbon-hetero atom bond formation between a trifluoromethyl fragment and a suitable nucleophile. 

Antonio Togni and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich have successfully shown that two of these crystalline, bench-stable reagents can be reacted with primary and secondary phosphorus nucleophiles to give mono-P-trifluoromethylated products. This transformation operates under remarkably mild conditions (low or ambient temperature) without the need of employing strong bases or other additives and uses easily accessible or even commercially available starting materials and reagents. 

This new method is currently being investigated as a tool for the synthesis of ligands with altered electronic properties. Togni anticipates that using such ligands in transition metal-catalyzed reactions may provide some interesting reactivity patterns. 'A further challenging goal will be to control the absolute configuration at the phosphorus in the case of P-stereogenic trifluoromethylphosphines,' said Togni.