Reactions of Nucleophiles with sp2 Hybridised Carbon Centres

3 Reactions of Nucleophiles with sp2 Hybridised Carbon Centres 

In the same way that we were primarily concerned with reactions of nitriles in the previous section, we will be concerned with the attack of nucleophiles on imines in this section. Imines, R2C=NR, are the nitrogen analogues of carbonyl groups, and we saw in Chapter 2 that imines may be stabilised by co-ordination to a metal ion capable of back-donation to the ligand -levels. We shall investigate the synthetic utility associated with the formation of co-ordinated imines in a later chapter. However, it is also possible to promote the hydrolysis of the imine by co-ordination to a positively charged metal ion. 

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