Water is an excellent solvent for organic chemistry and microwave heating offers a very efficient way of heating reaction mixtures. In this article, by focusing on the Suzuki reaction, it is shown how these two methods, used alone or together, can impact modern synthetic chemistry, making reactions faster, easier and cleaner.

Microwave heating greatly accelerates Pd-catalyzed decarboxylative coupling of aromatic acids and aryl iodides, and allows the coupling of benzoic acids with unactivated arenes.