Organic Letters
Letter
Albeit that frequently used diazonium tetrafluoroborates are
often significantly more stable, some of them, such as 3-pyridyl
diazonium tetrafluoroborate, can still undergo spontaneous
decomposition.9 Further, high electrophilicity of diazonium
salts may also cause side reactions and poor compatibility with
certain functional groups. On the other hand, aryl halides, as a
standard aryl source in Heck-type reactions, feature high
stability, compatibility, as well as feasible accessibility and
satisfying reactivity.4c Thus, developing alternative methods
employing aryl halides as the substrates instead of aryl
diazoniums is of practical importance in chiral anion-mediated
chemistry.7 Previously, our group reported an enantioselective
multicomponent carbonyl allylation of aldehydes with dienes
and alkynyl bromides.10 Inspired by this work, as well as
previously mentioned references using aryl diazoniums, we
envisioned that aryl halides might be ideal substrate in the
presence of a proper halide scavenger and a chiral anion
source. As shown in Scheme 1c, with basic silver salts as the
halide scavenger11 in the presence of a chiral Brønsted acid,12
the oxidative addition complex can be readily converted to a
chiral anion pair, and renders the following Heck-type
transformations enantioselective.
To testify the hypothesis, we turned our attention to realize
the palladium-catalyzed enantioselective cascade Heck/Tsuji−
Trost reaction (also known as 1,2-carboamination) of 1,3-
dienes13 with 2-iodoaniline derivatives through a chiral
counteranion strategy. The reaction pioneered by Dieck14
and Larock15 features high efficiency to construct heterocycles
with simple starting materials. However, the enantioselective
version of the intermolecular transformation remained a
challenging problem for decades. Employing chiral phosphor-
amidite ligands, our group disclosed an enantioselective
annulation of 1,3-dienes with 2-iodoanilines, but with only
up to 87% ee (Scheme 2a).16 This reaction might be an ideal
platform to test the chiral anion-mediated Heck-type reactions
with aryl halides. Our detailed design is shown in Scheme 2b
with silver carbonate as the halide scavenger and a catalytic
amount of chiral phosphoric acid (B*-H)12 as the chiral anion
source. Initially, aryl iodide 1 undergoes oxidative addition to
the palladium center to give aryl palladium iodide intermediate
I. Then, salt metathesis17 can occur between palladium iodide
species I and the chiral silver phosphate, which is in situ
generated from silver carbonate and the chiral acid (path a).
1,3-Diene 2 then undergoes migratory insertion with the
resulted chiral ion pair II to give π-allyl−Pd complex III
bearing a chiral counteranion. Subsequent chiral anion-
controlled intramolecular enantioselective Tsuji−Trost proc-
ess18 produces chiral indoline 3 and regenerates both the
Pd(0) catalyst and the chiral phosphoric acid for the next
catalytic cycle. Notably, it is also possible that intermediate I
directly reacts with 1,3-diene 2 to form an achiral π-allyl−Pd
complex III′, which may possibly lead to racemic product. On
the other hand, it is quite likely that III′ can also transform
into III via fast salt metathesis, ensuring the stereocontrol of
the whole process. It is worth mentioning that, if necessary, the
silver source could be recycled from the silver iodide
precipitate through well-established procedures.19 Herein, we
report the chiral anion-mediated asymmetric Heck/Tsuji−
Trost annulation of aryl iodides and 1,3-diene, leading to chiral
indolines with up to 93% ee.
Our investigation started with the reaction of N-tosyl-2-
iodoaniline 1a, (E)-1-Phenyl-1,3-butadiene 2a, Ag2CO3, and 4
Å molecular sieves with catalytic amounts of Pd(PPh3)4 and
BINOL-derived chiral phosphoric acid 4a (Table 1).
Encouragingly, desired chiral indoline 3aa could be obtained
in 59% yield 28% ee (entry 1). Inspired by literature reports of
DMSO effects on Heck-type reactions,7e we were pleased to
find that addition of a small amount of DMSO to the system
could significantly improve the outcome of the reaction to 81%
yield and 46% ee (entry 2). Subsequently, a number of chiral
phosphoric acids were evaluated to further enhance the
enantioselectivity. Enlarging the steric hindrance of substitu-
ents at the 3,3′-positions of the binaphthyl backbone could
clearly benefit the enantioselectivity of the reaction (up to 86%
ee, entries 3−4 vs entry 2). SPINOL-based chiral phosphoric
acids led to 3aa in similar levels of yield, but with lower
enantioselectivity (entries 5−6). Switching to H8-BINOL-
based phosphoric acids resulted in slightly higher enantiose-
lectivities (entries 7−9), and the highest enantioselectivity of
90% ee could be observed with 4h. Switching silver carbonate
to other metal carbonates, such as K2CO3, Na2CO3, and
PbCO3, no enantioselectivity was observed (entries 10−12),
indicating that silver cation might be crucial to ensure fast
anion exchange to form chiral ion pair II. Silver phosphate as
the base and halide scavenger could also render the reaction
enantioselective, but with lower enantioselectivity (entry 13),
while AgBF4, AgF, or organic base DIPEA all led to racemic
product (entries 14−16). These results disclosed that fast
formation of the chiral silver phosphate is also essential for the
stereocontrol of the reaction. The effect of phosphine ligands
was also examined, identifying Ph3P to be the optimal ligand
With the optimal reaction conditions in hand, the generality
of 2-iodoanilines was first investigated for the reactions with
1,3-diene 2a (Scheme 3). The substrates with either an
electron-donating or electron-withdrawing substituent (1b−
1i) were amenable to this reaction, delivering the correspond-
ing indolines 3ba−3ia in high yields of up to 89% and with
high enantioselectivities ranging from 86% to 93% ee.
Meanwhile, for 4-substituted substrates, electron-donating
Scheme 2. Two Strategies for the Asymmetric Heck/Tsuji−
Trost Annulation Reaction
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Org. Lett. 2021, 23, 3834−3838