New approach to make chiral amines from internal olefins revealed
Clever reaction design enables the direct addition of N–H bonds to unactivated internal alkenes with high enantioselectivity
A system involving a cationic iridium catalyst has enabled the first enantioselective addition of an N–H bond to an unactivated internal olefin. The new strategy provides a starting point to overcome a long-standing challenge in organic chemistry and is an important step towards functionalising basic feedstocks for different uses. ‘We revealed an approach to add N–H bonds to carbon–carbon double bonds within a set of alkenes that have rarely undergone this reaction before and never with control of the absolute configuration of chiral products,’ says John Hartwig at the University of California, Berkeley in the US, who led the study.