Marriage of porphyrin chemistry with metal-catalysed reactions.

The development of porphyrin synthesis by means of transition metal-catalyzed reactions is explored in this feature article. Porphyrins have been receiving much attention in a wide area of chemistry as functional dyes, non-linear optical materials, ligands for a variety of metals, structural motifs in supramolecules, and so forth. However, they have been merely recognized as a reaction substrate in transition metal-catalyzed transformations. Recently, application of such new methodologies to porphyrin synthesis has proven to be very powerful to create new types of porphyrinic compounds, which have their own intriguing structures and properties. New transformations on porphyrins via transition metal catalysis offer us prospects of new designs of architectures, thus facilitating further development of this important class of functional molecules.