Angewandte
Chemie
DOI: 10.1002/anie.201202466
Biaryl Synthesis
À
À
Cobalt-Catalyzed Direct Arylation and Benzylation by C H/C O
Cleavage with Sulfamates, Carbamates, and Phosphates**
Weifeng Song and Lutz Ackermann*
Dedicated to Professor Lutz F. Tietze on the occasion of his 70th birthday
Efficient methods for the selective preparation of biaryls are
of key importance, as these structural motifs are crucial
building blocks for natural products, liquid crystals, and
functional materials. Particularly, palladium-catalyzed cross-
coupling reactions between nucleophilic metalated arenes
and electrophilic aryl halides have matured into indispensable
tools for the synthesis of substituted biaryls (Scheme 1a).[1]
However, recent focus has shifted towards catalytic arylations
with phenol derivatives as organic electrophiles, because
these arylating reagents are inexpensive, readily accessible,
and can easily be implemented as directing groups in versatile
arene functionalization strategies.[2] Unfortunately, the high
recent progress in cross-coupling chemistry has been accom-
À
plished with challenging C C bond formations using fluorine-
free, yet difficult to activate, aryl tosylates, phosphates,
sulfamates, or carbamates (Scheme 1b).[4,5] Although these
methods have proven to be highly versatile, they are
inherently limited, as they rely on prefunctionalized organ-
ometallic starting materials. Thus, a significantly more
sustainable strategy is represented by the direct transforma-
[6]
À
tion of ubiquitous C H bonds as latent functional groups.
À
Thus far, C H bond arylations with fluorine-free phenol-
based electrophiles were accomplished on heteroarenes with
the aid of palladium complexes,[7] whereas nickel catalysts
were elegantly utilized by Itami for the most recent direct
À
C O bond strength in phenols calls for the activation of these
arylations of C H acidic azoles.[8] On the contrary, the direct
À
precursors, which has been predominantly achieved with
expensive fluorine-containing reagents.[3] However, notable
arylation of arenes with aryl tosylates or mesylates is, to date,
unfortunately restricted to relatively expensive complexes of
the rare transition metals ruthenium[9,10] and palladium
(Scheme 1c).[11]
Recent seminal contributions by the research groups of
Nakamura and Yoshikai highlighted the power of inexpensive
[13,14]
cobalt[12] catalysts for direct C H bond alkylations.
In
À
considering the most recent success in cobalt-catalyzed direct
arylations through radical intermediates,[6,15–17] as well as the
non-radical direct arylations with Grignard reagents reported
by Wang and Shi,[18] we became fascinated by developing step-
economical cobalt-catalyzed biaryl syntheses through chal-
À
À
lenging C H/C O bond cleavages, which we herein report.
We initiated our studies by exploring the reaction
conditions for the direct arylation with electronically deacti-
vated sulfamate 2a (Table 1). Although mono- or bidentate
phosphine ligands unfortunately provided unsatisfactory
results (entries 1–3), N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC)[19,20]
À
precursors were more effective for catalytic C H bond
transformations, with N,N-bis(mesityl)imidazolium chloride
(IMesHCl) delivering optimal yields (entries 4–8). Notably,
the bases lithium hexamethyldisilazide (LiHMDS) and
KOtBu failed to affect the desired direct arylation with aryl
sulfamates 2, and CyMgCl[21] was instead found to be the
additive of choice (Cy = cyclohexyl; entries 8–12). Among the
solvents tested, polar aprotic 1,3-dimethyl-3,4,5,6-tetrahydro-
2-pyrimidinone (DMPU) proved beneficial for direct alkyla-
tions (entries 8 and 13–15), as was recently noted by
Nakamura.[13b,d] Also, comparable catalytic efficacies were
observed for both cobalt(II) and cobalt(III) complexes
(entries 8 and 17).
Scheme 1. Strategies to achieve a versatile and economically attractive
biaryl synthesis. [TM]=transition metal complex.
[*] M. Sc. W. Song, Prof. Dr. L. Ackermann
Institut fꢀr Organische und Biomolekulare Chemie
Georg-August-Universitꢁt
Tammannstrasse 2, 37077 Gçttingen (Germany)
E-mail: lutz.ackermann@chemie.uni-goettingen.de
[**] Support by the DFG, the Georg-August-Universitꢁt Gçttingen, and
the Chinese Scholarship Council (fellowship to W.S.) is gratefully
acknowledged. We thank Ayesha Babar for the synthesis of starting
materials, as well as Dr. Benudhar Punji for helpful discussions and
preliminary experiments with aryl chlorides.
À
We next explored the scope of the cobalt-catalyzed C H
bond arylation with aryl sulfamates 2 using the optimized
catalytic system (Scheme 2). Notably, electron-rich, and thus
Supporting information for this article is available on the WWW
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 1 – 6
ꢀ 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
1
These are not the final page numbers!