Metal-catalyzed azide–alkyne cycloaddition (MAAC) has been well-defined during the past decades to afford various 1,2,3-triazoles [
13-
16]. However, most of the reactions are limited to use terminal alkynes because of low reactivities and complicated selectivities for electron-rich internal alkynes. Until recently, Mascareñas, López, Sun, Jia, Hong, Cui, our group and others have successfully synthesized a series of 1,4,5-fully substituted 1,2,3-triazoles starting from internal alkynes with excellent regioselectivities using nitrogen-, sulfur- or seleno groups as proximal and strong directing groups to coordinate with various transition metals including Ru, Ir, Rh and Ni (
Scheme 1a1) [
17-
34]. Lin, Jia and Fokin's group used the hydroxyl group from internal propargyl alcohol as directing group to accomplish 1,5-regioselectivities by ruthenium-catalyzed azide–alkyne cycloaddition (RuAAC) [
35]. The hydroxyl group as hydrogen bond donor could coordinate with ligating chloride from ruthenium catalyst to favor the 1,5-regioselectivities (
Scheme 1b2). Unfortunately, such RuAAC reaction lacks both the regioselectivities and chemoselectivities if the directing group was replaced by ether group, which was mainly due to the weak coordination ability for ether as hydrogen bond acceptor (
Scheme 1b3) [
36-
37]. Moreover, remote directing group has never been applied in tuning selectivity in cycloaddition, which also significantly limited the further application of MAAC reactions [
38-
42]. As known that ether is one of the most fundamental groups in natural products, drug molecules, polymers and materials [
43]. Numerous compounds with diverse biological activities also contain the ether-substituted triazoles [
44-
46]. Therefore, it is of great significance and interest to develop a direct approach to access fully substituted 5-ether-1,2,3-triazoles with high regioselectivities and chemoselectivities by remote ether groups-directed cycloaddition reaction. Considering that the failure for ether-directed AAC reactions, and as a continuation of our pursuit of highly regioselective cycloaddition reaction, we hypothesized that iridium(I) with stronger coordination ability to the lone-pair electron of ether groups could potentially solve the remote-controlled issues. Thus, we used ether group as directing group to coordinate with iridium catalyst, which resulted in excellent 1,5-regioselectivities and excellent chemoselectivities for the synthesis of various fully substituted 5-ether-1,2,3-triazoles. Beyond that, we found that even the remote ether group (up to four σ bonds away from internal alkyne part) can also control the regioselectivities well during the IrAAC process (
Scheme 1c).