Palladium-catalyzed aerobic transformation has been one of the most challenging topics within organometallics chemistry. Recently, the corresponding methodology has been developed rapidly, involving alcohol oxidation, alkene oxidation, oxidative coupling and so on, which stimulated considerable interests in mechanistic investigation of the oxidation of Pd with O2 . This review summarizes most of the mechanistic studies on this topic during the past ten years. Moreover, the future of the mechanistic investigation for aerobic oxidation of Pd is also discussed.
