Bioinspired Iron-Catalyzed Dehydration of Aldoximes to Nitriles: A General N-O Redox-Cleavage Method.

Hongjie Gao, Jia-Yi Chen, Zhiqiang Peng, Lei Feng, Chen-Ho Tung, Wenguang Wang

The Journal of organic chemistry 2022 Aug 19

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Inspired by OxdA that operates biocatalytic aldoxime dehydration, we have developed an efficient iron catalyst, Cp*Fe(1,2-Cy2PC6H4O) (1), which rapidly converts various aliphatic and aromatic aldoximes to nitriles with release of H2O at room temperature. The catalysis involves redox activation of the N-O bond by a 1e- transfer from the iron catalyst to the oxime. Such redox-mediated N-O cleavage was demonstrated by the isolation of a ferrous iminato intermediate from the reaction of the ketoxime substrate. This iron-catalyzed acceptorless dehydration approach represents a general method for the preparation of nitriles, and it also delivers salicylonitriles by catalyzing the Kemp elimination reaction.

Citation

Hongjie Gao, Jia-Yi Chen, Zhiqiang Peng, Lei Feng, Chen-Ho Tung, Wenguang Wang. Bioinspired Iron-Catalyzed Dehydration of Aldoximes to Nitriles: A General N-O Redox-Cleavage Method. The Journal of organic chemistry. 2022 Aug 19;87(16):10848-10857