Pyridine 1-oxides, basicities

A good correlation has been found between pKa values for a series of pyridine 1-oxides and the corresponding pyridines. Weakly basic pyridine 1-oxides that protonate in the H0 region have been shown to follow the HA acidity function. Some of these have been used to extend the HA scale and to determine its variation with temperature. 

Substituted indoles are of biological interest and are not readily synthesized by conventional methods of indole chemistry. Annulation of a nuclear methyl and an a-ethoxyimine (or an imidate) under basic conditions is a promising procedure. The pyridine oxide ester (87.1) may be converted in high yields into two kinds of pyrrole carboxylic ester the potassium salt of the imidate, on heating in DMF, gives the 3-(2-oxocarboxylate) whereas dilute mineral acid leads to the 2-carboxylate ester. 

Pyridine being basic in nature gets oxidized with atmospheric oxygen thereby retarding its purity and reactivity hence, it should always be freshly redistilled before use in a reaction. The same holds good for aniline. 

To minimize the formation of fuhninating silver, these complexes should not be prepared from strongly basic suspensions of silver oxide. Highly explosive fuhninating silver, beheved to consist of either silver nitride or silver imide, may detonate spontaneously when silver oxide is heated with ammonia or when alkaline solutions of a silver—amine complex are stored. Addition of appropriate amounts of HCl to a solution of fuhninating silver renders it harmless. Stable silver complexes are also formed from many ahphatic and aromatic amines, eg, ethylamine, aniline, and pyridine. 

The cleavage of fused pyrazines represents an important method of synthesis of substituted pyrazines, particularly pyrazinecarboxylic acids. Pyrazine-2,3-dicarboxylic acid is usually prepared by the permanganate oxidation of either quinoxalines or phenazines. The pyrazine ring resembles the pyridine ring in its stability rather than the other diazines, pyridazine and pyrimidine. Fused systems such as pteridines may easily be converted under either acidic or basic conditions into pyrazine derivatives (Scheme 75). 

Pyridinethiones acylation, 2, 357 alkylation, 2, 357 aromaticity, 2, 148 protonation, 2, 357 tautomerism, 2, 356 Pyridine-2-thiones aromaticity, 2, 156 basicity, 2, 157 oxidation, 2, 357 N-oxide, sodium salt biocide, 1, 399 synthesis, 2, 360... 

The methods outlined, of course, are readily applicable to a wide variety of substituted heterocycles like the carboxyl, hydroxy and mercapto derivatives of pyridines, pyridine 1-oxides, pyrroles, etc. The application to amines and to diaza compounds such as pyrimidine, where the two centers are basic, is obvious except that now 23 takes the role of the neutral compound, 21 and 22 the roles of the tautomeric first conjugate bases, and 20 the role of the second conjugate base. Extensions to molecules with more than two acidic or basic centers, such as aminonicotinic acid, pyrimidinecarboxylic acids, etc., are obvious although they tend to become algebraically cumbersome, involving (for three centers) three measurable Kg s, four Ay s, and fifteen ideal dissociation constants (A ), a total of twenty-two constants of which seven are independent. 

The second major discovery regarding the use of MTO as an epoxidation catalyst came in 1996, when Sharpless and coworkers reported on the use of substoichio-metric amounts of pyridine as a co-catalyst in the system [103]. A change of solvent from tert-butanol to dichloromethane and the introduction of 12 mol% of pyridine even allowed the synthesis of very sensitive epoxides with aqueous hydrogen peroxide as the terminal oxidant. A significant rate acceleration was also observed for the epoxidation reaction performed in the presence of pyridine. This discovery was the first example of an efficient MTO-based system for epoxidation under neutral to basic conditions. Under these conditions the detrimental acid-induced decomposition of the epoxide is effectively avoided. With this novel system, a variety of... 

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