876728-20-0Relevant articles and documents
Scalable and safe synthetic organic electroreduction inspired by Li-ion battery chemistry
Peters, Byron K.,Rodriguez, Kevin X.,Reisberg, Solomon H.,Beil, Sebastian B.,Kawamata, Yu,Baran, Phil S.,Hickey, David P.,Klunder, Kevin,Gorey, Timothy J.,Anderson, Scott L.,Minteer, Shelley D.,Collins, Michael,Starr, Jeremy,Chen, Longrui,Udyavara, Sagar,Neurock, Matthew
, p. 838 - 845 (2019)
Reductive electrosynthesis has faced long-standing challenges in applications to complex organic substrates at scale. Here, we show how decades of research in lithium-ion battery materials, electrolytes, and additives can serve as an inspiration for achieving practically scalable reductive electrosynthetic conditions for the Birch reduction. Specifically, we demonstrate that using a sacrificial anode material (magnesium or aluminum), combined with a cheap, nontoxic, and water-soluble proton source (dimethylurea), and an overcharge protectant inspired by battery technology [tris(pyrrolidino)phosphoramide] can allow for multigram-scale synthesis of pharmaceutically relevant building blocks. We show how these conditions have a very high level of functional-group tolerance relative to classical electrochemical and chemical dissolving-metal reductions. Finally, we demonstrate that the same electrochemical conditions can be applied to other dissolving metal-type reductive transformations, including McMurry couplings, reductive ketone deoxygenations, and epoxide openings.
