Family of Well-Defined Chiral-at-Cobalt(III) Complexes as Metal-Templated Hydrogen-Bond-Donor Catalysts: Effect of Chirality at the Metal Center on the Stereochemical Outcome of the Reaction

Transition Metal-Catalyzed Transformations of Chalcones

Chalcones are a class of naturally occurring flavonoid compounds associated to a variety of biological and pharmacological properties. Several reviews have been published describing the synthesis and biological properties of a vast array of analogues. However, overviews on the reactivity of chalcones has only been explored in a few accounts. To fill this gap, a systematic survey on the most recent developments in the transition metal-catalyzed transformation of chalcones was performed. The chemistry of copper, palladium, zinc, iron, manganese, nickel, ruthenium, cobalt, rhodium, iridium, silver, indium, gold, titanium, platinum, among others, as versatile catalysts will be highlighted, covering the literature from year 2000 to 2023, in more than 380 publications.

Mechanochemical Synthesis of Fluorinated Imines

A number of imines, including 12 new compounds, previously not reported in the literature, derived from variously fluorinated benzaldehydes and different anilines or chiral benzylamines were synthesized by a solvent-free mechanochemical method, which was based on the manual grinding of equimolar amounts of the substrates at the room temperature. In a very short reaction time of only 15 min, the method produced the expected products with good-to-excellent yields. The yields were comparable or significantly higher than those reported in the literature for the imines synthesized by other methods. Importantly, the conditions used for the reactions with aniline derivatives also resulted in the high yields of imines obtained from chiral benzylamines, and can be extended to the synthesis with other similar amines. Structures of all imines were confirmed by NMR spectroscopy: ¹H, ¹³C and ¹⁹F. For four compounds, X-ray structures were also obtained. The synthetic approach presented in this paper contributes to the prevention of environmental pollution and can be easily extended for larger-scale syntheses. The mechanochemical solvent-free method provides a convenient strategy particularly useful for the preparation of fluorinated imines being versatile intermediates or starting material in the synthesis of drugs and other fine chemicals.