Electron-transfer Reactions of Heteroaromatic Compounds

Electron-transfer reactions of heteroaromatic compounds 01MI33. 

Numerous reviews have appeared which are relevant to aromatic photochemistry and are also of general interest and application these include accounts of the chemistry of excited-state complexes by Davidson, the photochemical electron-transfer reactions of ethylenes and related compounds by Mattes and Farid, photosolvolyses and photoreactions involving carbo-cations by Cristol and Bindel, conformational flexibility and photochemistry by Wagner, asymmetric photochemistry in solution by Rau, and the photochemistry of iminium salts and related heteroaromatic systems by Mariano." The photochemistry of fragrance materials has been considered by Shibamoto and Mihara, and in their second article they deal with aromatic compounds and phototoxicity. ... 

Unactivated aryl halides also undergo nucleophilic displacement via electron transfer in the initial step the so-called SRN1 mechanism. It is now clear that in the case of heteroaromatic compounds, nucleophilic substitution by the Srn process often competes with the addition-elimination pathway. The SRN reactions are radical chain processes, and are usually photochemically promoted. For example, ketone (895) is formed by the SRN1 pathway from 2-chloroquinoxaline (894) (82JOC1036). 

The indirect reduction of many organic substrates, in particular alkyl and aryl halides, by means of radical anions of aromatic and heteroaromatic compounds has been the subject of numerous papers over the last 25 years [98-121]. Many issues have been addressed, ranging from the exploration of synthetic aspects to quantitative descriptions of the kinetics involved. Saveant et al. coined the expression redox catalysis for an indirect reduction, in which the homogeneous reaction is a pure electron-transfer reaction with no chemical modification of the mediator (i.e., no ligand transfer, hydrogen abstraction, or hydride shift reactions). In the following we will consider such reactions and derive the relevant kinetic equations to show the kind of kinetic information that can be extracted. 

Indeed this is true also for the class of reactions treated in this book, viz. electron-transfer reactions, which also with these compounds already have an important role and are expected to have a much larger one in the near future. The number of chemical reactions more or less unambiguously characterized as electron-transfer processes in heteroaromatic chemistry in the current literature is so large that an exhaustive presentation is far beyond the space allotted for this contribution. This is, therefore, limited to discussion of the most characteristic chemical paths—or at least those which seem to answer this requirement in the opinion of these authors— with a choice of appropriate examples. 

Several reviews have been published within the year which are of general relevance to the photoreactions of aromatic compounds. The subjects of these reviews include photochemistry in ionic liquids and in isotropic and anisotropic media, organic synthesis utilizing photoinduced electron-transfer reactions," heteroatom-directed photoarylation processes, photochromism, and photochemical molecular devices. Reviews more directly pertinent to the sections in the present chapter include those of the photoisomerization of five-membered heteroaromatic azoles, the photocycloaddition of benzene derivatives to alkenes, Diels-Alder additions of anthracenes, advances in the synthesis of polycyclic aromatic compounds, diarylethene-based photochromic switches, the photo-Fries rearrangement, and the application of Diels-Alder trapping of photogenerated o-xylenols to the synthesis of novel compounds. " A number of chapters in the two recently published handbooks of photochemistry and photobiology and in the revised edition of the text on photochromism are also pertinent to the current subject matter. 

A variety of photoinduced electron transfer reactions leading to the alkylation of heteroaromatic compounds are known. A typical example involves the reaction of five-membered heterocycles with electron-rich alkenes as illustrated in Scheme 9 Thus, photolysis of furans in the presence of 1,1-diarylethenes and a sensitizer (such as 1-cyanonaphthalene) gives alkylated products in good yield following an unusual... 

---