We report a simple and efficient procedure for the ligand-free as well as ligand-assisted Suzuki reaction in both pure water and aqueous media. The cross-coupling reactions proceed successfully using phenylboronic acid or potassium phenyltrifluoroborate as a nucleophilic coupling partner. The method can be effectively applied to both activated and deactivated aryl halides yielding quantitative conversions. The catalytic activity of couplings performed in pure water increases when utilizing supramolecular additives, but decreases under standard phase-transfer conditions. Finally, the palladium loading is reducible from 3.0 mol% to 0.4 mol% without any loss of conversion.

The worldwide undisputable and unattainable chemist is nature, using water as a solvent of choice in biosynthesis. Water as a solvent not only indicates “green chemistry” but is also inevitable in biochemical reactions as well as syntheses of several pharmaceutical products. In the last few decades, several organic reactions were successfully carried out under aqueous conditions, a powerful and attractive tool in organic synthesis metathesis reaction. This review summarises advances made in metathesis reaction in aqueous media. Two main strategies can be distinguished: the design of water soluble catalysts to obtain homogeneous conditions and using commercially available catalysts to utilize the advantages of heterogeneous conditions.