Iron catalysts cross-coupling reactions

Fig. 2 Catalysts and ligands used in iron-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions with alkyl halides...

Iron salts are easily accessible, inexpensive and abundant and the metal itself is non-toxic. Their use should therefore become attractive from an economic and environmental point of view in a wide variety of carbohydrate transformations, in either stoichiometric applications or as a catalyst. As stated in the introduction, this review concentrates on a few transformations promoted by ferric salts used as Lewis acids in our laboratories and does not present exhaustive work done in carbohydrate chemistry with these salts. Many more other applications have been reported. However, their uses could be far more developed for fast and selective transformations of carbohydrates to useful new molecular constructs. Besides the acidic properties of iron(iii) presented here, iron chemistry is rich and could be particularly fruitful with carbohydrates in generating new types of complexes for regioselective transformations or in carbon-carbon forming reactions based on iron-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. The glycochemistry community should certainly expect many more useful accomplishments in the near future. 

Finally, the mechanism in Scheme 3 bears a resemblance to that presented above for the nickel-catalyzed reaction of methylmagnesium bromide and aryl bromides. However, there are outstanding differences between iron and nickel in their abilities to effect cross coupling reactions. Iron is a catalyst which is effective at lower temperatures and concentrations than used with nickel. Even more importantly, cross coupling can be effected completely stereospecifically with an iron catalyst and no alkyl isomerization of the Grignard component has been observed, in contrast to the nickel-catalyzed reactions. 

Selective cross-coupling reactions between C(sp ) and C(5p ) centers had been one of the most difficult tasks in carbon-carbon bond synthesis until the early 1970s, when it was first reported that iron, nickel, palladium and copper - catalysts are extremely effective for cross-coupling of Grignard reagents with organic halides. Now, nearly 20 years later, transition metal catalyz cross-coupling has become the reaction of first choice for this purpose. 

Various transition metals (Pd, Rh, Ru, Cu, Fe, etc.) have been shown to be effective for cross-coupling reactions involving C-H bond activation in recent years (for copper, see [33-38] for iron, see [39, 40]). Pd(II) salts have emerged as the preferred catalysts to promote the C-H bond cleavage in catalytic direct arylation reactions. This process can be classified into two parts, the organometallic reagent is replaced by a simple arene in one case, and the aryl halide is replaced by a simple arene in another (Scheme 4). 

Scheme 13.22 Catalytic cross-coupling reactions mediated by a low-valent iron catalyst.

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