Salt effects nucleophilic substitution

Aminodebromination of 4-bromo-l//-3-benzazepin-2-amine (25) with triethylamine occurs readily and results in formation of the quaternary salt 26 (see also Section 3.2.1.5.6.), whereas attempts to effect nucleophilic substitution of bromide with primary or secondary amines gives only tarry mixtures.41 The bromo group is also resistant to displacement by azide and benz-cncthiolate but undergoes substitution with thiocyanate ion in hot dimethylformamide to give the 4-thiocyanato derivative 27 rather than the thiourea by addition at the amine function. 

The well-known action of silver(i) salts on nucleophilic substitution in alkyl halides is another commonplace example of this effect. The silver ion interacts with the halide, thus weakening the carbon-halogen bond and enhancing the leaving ability of the halide... 

Nucleophilic aromatic substitution has been the subject of frequent and extensive reviews1-10. The data on reaction rates, reaction products, substituent effects, salt effects, etc. are all readily available and need not be reassembled here. In spite of this abundance of both data and discussion, some questions of mechanism remain incompletely resolved. 

Other salts, especially fluoride salts, (e.g., KF) can be used to perform nucleophilic substitution. As is well known, halides, and particularly the fluoride anions, are rather powerful Lewis bases and can exert a catalytic effect on aromatic nucleophilic substitutions in dipolar aprotic solvents. Phenols can be alkylated in the presence of KF (or CsF) absorbed on Celite64,65 or Et4NF.66 Taking advantage of this reaction, halophenols and dihalides with bisphenols have been successfully polymerized in sulfolane at 220-280°C by using KF as the base. 

A unimolecular ionization was shown to be the mechanism of solvolysis by means of rate studies, solvent effects, salt effects, and structural effects (179,180). The products of reaction consist of benzo [bjthiophen derivatives 209 or nucleophilic substitution products 210, depending upon the solvent system employed. By means of a series of elegant studies, Modena and co-workers have shown that the intermediate ion 208 can have either the open vinyl cation structure 208a or the cyclic thiirenium ion 208b, depending... 

An 8000-member library of trisamino- and aminooxy-l,3,5-triazines has been prepared by use of highly effective, microwave-assisted nucleophilic substitution of polypropylene (PP) or cellulose membrane-bound monochlorotriazines. The key step relied on the microwave-promoted substitution of the chlorine atom in monochlorotriazines (Scheme 12.7) [35]. Whereas the conventional procedure required relatively harsh conditions such as 80 °C for 5 h or very long reaction times (4 days), all substitution reactions were found to proceed within 6 min, with both amines and solutions of cesium salts of phenols, and use of microwave irradiation in a domestic oven under atmospheric reaction conditions. The reactions were conducted by applying a SPOT-synthesis technique [36] on 18 x 26 cm cellulose membranes leading to a spatially addressed parallel assembly of the desired triazines after cleavage with TFA vapor. This concept was later also extended to other halogenated heterocycles, such as 2,4,6-trichloropyrimidine, 4,6-dichloro-5-nitropyrimidine, and 2,6,8-trichloro-7-methylpurine, and applied to the synthesis of macrocyclic peptidomimetics [37]. 

Payne rearrangement. The Payne rearrangement2 of a primary cts-2,3-epoxy alcohol to a secondary 1,2-epoxy alcohol usually requires a basic aqueous medium, but it can be effected with BuLi in THF, particularly when catalyzed by lithium salts. As a consequence, the rearrangement becomes a useful extension of the Sharpless epoxidation, with both epoxides available for nucleophilic substitutions. Thus the more reactive rearranged epoxide can be trapped in situ by various organometallic nucleophiles. Cuprates of the type RCu(CN)Li are particularly effective for this purpose, and provide syn-diols (3).3... 

The attack of the nucleophile on the acceptor-substituted allene usually happens at the central sp-hybridized carbon atom. This holds true also if no nucleophilic addition but a nucleophilic substitution in terms of an SN2 reaction such as 181 — 182 occurs (Scheme 7.30) [245]. The addition of ethanol to the allene 183 is an exception [157]. In this case, the allene not only bears an acceptor but shows also the substructure of a vinyl ether. A change in the regioselectivity of the addition of nucleophilic compounds NuH to allenic esters can be effected by temporary introduction of a triphenylphosphonium group [246]. For instance, the ester 185 yields the phos-phonium salt 186, which may be converted further to the ether 187. Evidently, the triphenylphosphonium group induces an electrophilic character at the terminal carbon atom of 186 and this is used to produce 187, which is formally an abnormal product of the addition of methanol to the allene 185. This method of umpolung is also applicable to nucleophilic addition reactions to allenyl ketones in a modified procedure [246, 247]. 

The interfacial mechanism provides an acceptable explanation for the effect of the more lipophilic quaternary ammonium salts, such as tetra-n-butylammonium salts, Aliquat 336 and Adogen 464, on the majority of base-initiated nucleophilic substitution reactions which require the initial deprotonation of the substrate. Subsequent to the interfacial deprotonation of the methylene system, for example the soft quaternary ammonium cation preferentially forms a stable ion-pair with the soft carbanion, rather than with the hard hydroxide anion (Scheme 1.8). Strong evidence for the competing interface mechanism comes from the observation that, even in the absence of a catalyst, phenylacetonitrile is alkylated under two-phase conditions using concentrated sodium hydroxide [51],... 

E-(P-Alkylvinyl)phenyliodonium salts react with tetra-n-butylammonium halides to yield the correspondingly substituted Z-haloethenes (80-100% for chloro-, bromo- and iodo-derivatives) [41], In contrast, in the corresponding reaction with Z-(2-benzenesulphonyl-ethenyl)phenyliodonium salts, nucleophilic substitution occurs with retention of configuration to yield the Z-2-benzenesulphonyl-l-haloethenes [42], The ammonium fluorides fail to yield the fluoroethenes, but produce the ethynes by simple elimination [41]. Where carboxylic acids have low solubility in organic solvents, their conversion into the acid chlorides is frequently difficult. Phase-transfer catalysis not only allows the conversion to be effected rapidly, it also results in high yields of a wide range of acid chlorides [43]. 

In contrast with the reactions involving sulphide or hydrogen sulphide anions, aryl alkyl thioethers and unsymmetrical dialkyl thioethers (Table 4.3) are obtained conveniently by the analogous nucleophilic substitution reactions between haloalkanes and aryl or alkylthiols under mildly basic conditions in the presence of a quaternary ammonium salt [9-15] or polymer-supported quaternary ammonium salt [16]. Dimethyl carbonate is a very effective agent in the formation of methyl thioethers (4.1.4.B) [17]. 

The yields of reaction products from thermal nucleophilic substitution reactions in DMSO of 0- and p-nitrohalobenzenes (Zhang et al. 1993) or p-dinitrobenzene (Liu et al. 2002) with the sodium salt of ethyl a-cyanoacetate were found to be markedly diminished from the addition of small amounts of strong electron acceptors such as nitrobenzenes. At the same time, little or no diminution effects on the yields of the reaction products were observed from the addition of radical traps such as nitroxyls. These results are consistent with the conclusion that such reactions proceed via a nonchain radical nucleophilic substitution mechanism (Scheme 4.26). 

This ready nucleophilic substitution at the 6-position is surprising since this position is electron-rich in both dihydrodiazepines and dihydrodiaze-pinium salts and is the site at which electrophilic substitution occurs. The likely explanation is that in the presence of base some prototropic rearrangement of the normal dihydrodiazepine base into a bis-imino form takes place. Although the equilibrium concentration of the bis-imine is likely to be very small (it has not been observed spectroscopically) it would be strongly electrophilic at the 6-position owing to the combined effects of the bromine atom and the two azomethine groups, and could well be the reactive species in the nucleophilic substitution of the bromine atom ... 

The yield of the nucleophilic substitution product from the stepwise preassociation mechanism k[ = k. Scheme 2.4) is small, because of the low concentration of the preassociation complex (Xas 0.7 M for the reaction of X-2-Y). Formally, the stepwise preassociation reaction is kinetically bimolecular, because both the nucleophile and the substrate are present in the rate-determining step ( j). In fact, these reactions are borderline between S l and Sn2 because the kinetic order with respect to the nucleophile cannot be rigorously determined. A small rate increase may be due to either formation of nucleophile adduct by bimolecular nucleophilic substitution or a positive specific salt effect, whUe a formally bhnole-cular reaction may appear unimolecular due to an offsetting negative specific salt effect on the reaction rate. 

The enhanced nucleophilicity of weakly solvated fluoride ions, solubilized in non-polar solvents as their alkali metal salts by [18]crown-6, has been studied. The wide range of SN2 reactions possible with this system is illustrated in Table 3. Under equivalent conditions in the absence of crown ether no substitution occurs. Similar effects are seen with many nucleophiles which, even if soluble in the solvent employed, show increased nucleophilic substitution rates in the presence of crown ethers (B-78MI52104). However, the monocyclic crown compound exposes the cation on two sides to approach by the counteranion (see Figures lb, c and d for illustrations of this effect in the crystalline state). The resultant ion pairs that form in non-polar solvents reduce the reactivity of the anion. 

The use of molten salts as nucleophile sources has been shown to have a profound effect (rates independent of the anion and badly dependent of substrate, transition state resembling SN2) on aromatic substitution reactions, which has been attributed to the interaction of the solvent and the molten salt908 (reaction 272). 

As is true for other classes of aromatic nucleophilic substitution, the halogen displacement can frequently be catalyzed by copper or copper(I) salts. Using sodium hydride as the base and copper(I) iodide as catalyst, a series of o-bromophenylethylamine derivatives, including both amides and carbamates, have been cyclized. Oxidation to the indole can be effected with manganese dioxide (81JCS(P1)290). 

The development of methods to effect nucleophilic addition to carbon-carbon double bonds by prior activation with metal cations has been applied, at least in a preliminary way, as a method of pyrrole ring closure. The conversion of butadienes to N-substituted pyrroles can be accomplished in two stages. In acetic add, 1,4-dienes react with PdnCl2 to give tr-allyl complexes with introduction of acetate at C-4. The ir-allyl complexes then react with amines to give a l-amino-4-acetoxy-2-butene (equation 70). When the addition of the amine is carried out in the presence of a silver salt and triphenylphosphine, a pyrrole is isolated, probably by cyclization of the amino-substituted allyl-Pd complex (equation 71) (81CC59). Although this procedure is attractive in terms of the simplicity of the... 

Moreover, product formation was not the same. Dibenzyl ethylsulfonium salt 72 gave only benzyl ethyl sulfide (73) and benzyl thiocyanate 74, but no dibenzyl sulfide or ethyl thiocyanate. By contrast, the cyclic sulfonium salt 75 gave a mixture containing chiefly (80%) dihydroisothianaphthene (76) with an equivalent amount of ethyl thiocyanate (77) and a minor amount (20%) of the sulfide-thiocyanate 78. This work represents the first direct experimental information on the rate of bimolecular nucleophilic substitution and relative orientation of the benzene ring and the leaving group and it demonstrates clearly the importance of stereoelectronic effects in these reactions. 

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