Main part of the research deals with development of transition metal catalyzed methodologies for organic synthesis. Our group has developed several new procedures for transformation of alkynes to functionalized alkenes and dines. It is a Green Chemistry synthesis with 100% atom efficiency (only addition reactions, no by-products). Utilization of transition metal complexes as catalysts makes the chemical transformations possible in a mild reaction conditions with high stereo- and regioselectivity. On the moment successful examples include synthesis of iodine-, sulfur- and selenium-substituted products with stereodefined geometry.

    The synthetic work is accompanied with detailed studies of reaction mechanisms. Reactive intermediates were detected with NMR spectroscopy directly under catalytic conditions and some representative transition metal complexes have been isolated.

    The mechanistic investigations of transition metal catalyzed chemical reactions are hardly possible with experiment alone. Fortunately, modern quantum chemistry provides the necessary tools to accomplish the missing data, which can not be retrieved from the experiment.

    Two mechanisms of alkynes triple bond activation by platinum complexes, namely insertion and nucleophil addition, were studied and the key-factors responsible for changing stereoselectivity of the activation process were revealed. Another interesting problem concerns a new carbon-carbon bond formation in the coordination sphere of transition metal complexes.

    With no doubts NMR is one of the most powerful methods for studying catalytic reactions under homogeneous conditions. The potential of the method is far from being completely utilized on the moment and it provides several opportunities for further development. Particularly, we have studied the following new applications:

• NMR monitoring of solvent-free and molten state systems;
• NMR approach for stereochemistry determination of selenium substituted alkenes;
• GBIS-HMQC two-dimensional NMR experiment.