The latest findings on titanium-catalysed carbon–carbon bond formation from the research group led by Prof. Dr Sven Doye (Institute of Chemistry) are given special recognition in issue no. 27 of *Angewandte Chemie* (class of 2009, pp. 4988–4991) in the ‘Highlights’ section. The research findings, which were developed over the course of the past year by Dipl.-Chem. Raphael Kubiak and Dipl.-Chem. Insa Prochnow over the course of the past year, focus on a one-step, waste-free and therefore resource-efficient synthesis of industrially important organic chemical compounds – known as amines – from simple starting materials in the presence of a titanium catalyst. As most amines are currently still produced via multi-step syntheses, an atom-efficient synthetic route to amines would be of great significance for both academic and industrial applications.

In the ‘Highlights’ section of *Angewandte Chemie*, one of the world’s two leading chemistry journals alongside the *Journal of the American Chemical Society*, highly significant new findings from original publications across the entire field of chemistry are usually presented in a didactically skilful manner by a competent third party, in order to bring them to the attention of a wider audience. The fact that the Oldenburg research findings are now presented and described in a comparative manner in the aforementioned article, alongside work from two competing research groups from the USA and Canada, impressively underlines the significance of the studies carried out here, which are already receiving funding under the highly demanding standard procedure of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

The German Research Foundation grants the Institute of Pure and Applied Chemistry funding for the procurement of a new 500 MHz NMR spectrometer in accordance with a proposal for large-scale research equipment drafted by Prof Dr Sven Doye and Prof Dr Thomas Müller.