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Imine Metathesis by Silica-Supported Catalysts Using the Methodology of Surface Organometallic Chemistry
Published on: October 18, 2019
Highly chemoselective reductive amination of carbonyl compounds promoted by InCl3/Et3SiH/MeOH system
On-Yi Lee1, Ka-Lun Law, Chun-Yu Ho
1Department of Chemistry, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, People's republic of China.
Abstract:
A new strategy has been developed for reductive amination of aldehydes and ketones with the InCl3/Et3SiH/MeOH system, which is a nontoxic system with highly chemoselective and nonwater sensitive properties. The methodology can be applied to a variety of cyclic, acyclic, aromatic, and aliphatic amines. Functionalities including ester, hydroxyl, carboxylic acid, and olefin are found to be stable under our conditions. The reaction shows a first-order kinetics profile with respect to both InCl3 and Et3SiH. Spectroscopic techniques such as NMR and ESI-MS have been employed to probe the active and resulting species arising from InCl3 and Et3SiH in MeOH, which are important in deriving a mechanistic proposal. In the ESI-MS studies, we have first discovered the existence of stable methanol-coordinated indium(III) species which are presumably responsible for the gentle generation of indium hydride at room temperature. The solvent attribution was crucial in tuning the reactivity of [In-H] species, leading to the establishment of mild reaction conditions. The system is superior in flexible tuning of hydride reactivity, resulting in the system being highly chemoselective.
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