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Reactions for making widely used aniline compounds break norms of synthesis

Chemists generally regard benzene rings as preformed units that are elaborated to build larger molecules. This idea has now been challenged in reactions for making anilines — precursors of many high-value chemical products.
  1. Valerie A. Schmidt

    1. Valerie A. Schmidt is in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA.

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Decades of research have provided chemists with the tools to synthesize a diverse array of organic molecules in short sequences of high-yielding reactions, making use of inexpensive and widely available chemical building blocks. When a new reaction is reported that fundamentally alters the idea of what can be used as a building block, it can be a game changer. Writing in Nature, Dighe et al.1 report one such potentially transformative reaction that uses light and two transition-metal catalysts to make products known as anilines — key ingredients for making pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, dyes, electronic materials and polymers2,3.

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Nature 584, 46-47 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02283-8

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