Fig. 1. Various strategies for skeletal editing of arenes and heteroarenes.

a, Heteroarene skeletal editing through single-atom insertion and deletion that can be used at a late-stage, yet not reported for pyridines. b, Atom swap in arenes is challenging, with existing methods showing limited substrate scope and therefore application to late-stage modification is not possible. c, Our developed strategy through sequential dearomatization, cycloaddition and rearomatizing retrocyclization enabling an atom-pair swap from CN to CC in pyridines. The method is a one-pot modular approach for pyridine editing with a broad substrate scope that is applicable to late-stage modification.