Next, the palladium cross coupling of 4 and 2 was investigated (Table ). Solubility issues of 4 in commonly used solvents for Suzuki coupling, such as 1,4 dioxane/water (entry 1), resulted in low yield; therefore, DMF was added as a third co-solvent (entry 2) to increase solubility and yield. Using only a DMF/water mixture (entry 3) resulted in similar yields as 1,4-dioxane/water and provided worse results than the three solvent system. Doubling the catalyst loading (entry 4) or increasing the equivalents of base (entry 5) did not have major impacts on the yield. H NMR yield based upon mesitylene as internal standard b Isolated yield c Catalyst loading of 20 mol%; d 10.0 eq. instead of 3.0 eq. were used.