Organometallic complexes mechanistic pathways

Much of the work on ligand substitution of organometallic complexes has involved metal carbonyls with a trialkyl or a triarylphosphine serving as the replacement ligand. Two main mechanistic pathways exist by which substitution may occur— associative (A) and dissociative (D). 

The formation of alkyne oligomers that are concomitantly formed in the hydroamination reactions catalyzed by the thorium complexes indicates that two possible different complexes can be considered as active, conceivably with inter-conversion causing the occurrence of the two parallel processes. The discernment between these two most probable mechanistic pathways to find the key organometallic intermediate, responsible for the hydroamination process, was achieved by kinetic and thermodynamic studies (Scheme 5). The first pathway proposed the insertion of an alkyne into a metal-imido (M=N) bond, as observed for early transition metal complexes [101]. The second pathway suggested the insertion of an alkyne into a metal-amido bond, as found in some lanthanide compounds [39, 58, 84, 85]... 

Gossen LJ, Koley D, Hermann HL, Thiel W (2005) Mechanistic pathways for oxidative addition of aryl halides to palladium(O) complexes A DFT study. Organometallics 24 2398-2410... 

In tenns of understanding the mechanistic aspects involved in such additimis on vinylic substrates via organometallic catalysts, analogies have been drawn to the hydroamination reactimis [28-30], Chiral metal complex-promoted asymmetric hydroaminations have been proposed to follow two different pathways. The first involves a sequence that commences with the oxidative addition of the N-H bond onto the metal ion followed by the insertion of the olefin and subsequent reductive elimination of the chiral substrate. An alternative pathway has also been proposed which involves the nucleophilic attack by the free amine on a coordinated olefin and a final protonolysis sequence, which leads to the release of the final product. Similar studies on metal irm-induced hydrophosphinations have been reported, and the mechanisms suspected to be in play include those proposed by Glueck and coworkers which basically involves the oxidative addition of a secondary phosphine followed by an olefin insertion [31], Togni and coworkers have also observed in certain scenarios the coordination of the olefin to the catalyst metal center followed by the addition of a secondary phosphine across the C-C double bond [32]. 

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