Xie Jin and Zhu Chengjian, School of chemistry and chemical engineering, Nanjing University, made important progress in visible light catalysis

Recently, Xie Jin group and Zhu Chengjian group of the research team of molecular and material synthesis of School of chemistry and chemical engineering of Nanjing University have made important progress in the field of visible light catalysis They have realized the reverse polar borohydride of imine catalyzed by visible light and organic small molecules for the first time This achievement "synergic photoedox and organocatalysis for inverse hydroboration of imines" was published online in the Comprehensive Journal of chemistry, angelw Chem Int ed (DOI: 10.1002 / anie 201800421) Associate Professor Xie Jin and Professor Zhu Chengjian are the corresponding authors of this paper The selective borohydride source of imine: the borohydride reaction of angew Chem Int ed imine is one of the most commonly used methods to prepare amines in organic synthesis laboratory Due to the highly polarized boron hydrogen bond, the hydrogen atom in borane always preferentially adds to the carbon end of imine A-aminoboron compounds are a kind of very important synthesis intermediates, but the traditional synthesis strategy is difficult to achieve the later modification of complex molecules After careful analysis, a new concept of polar inversion borohydride of imine was proposed for the first time Under mild conditions, borane radicals were directly produced from nhc-bh 3 by the cooperative catalysis of visible light and small organic molecules of mercaptan, which ingeniously realized the anti regioselective borohydride of imines In order to restrain the competitive borohydride process, benzyl mercaptan was selected as the best organic catalyst Importantly, the synthesis technology can be successfully applied to the late boron modification of complex biomolecules, making up for the limitations of previous strategies This work provides a new idea for the simple construction of a-aminoboron compounds, which is highly praised by the reviewers One of the anonymous reviewers commented that "this is a great addition to the average of reactions that NHC boradicals can achieve." Zhou neneng, Ph.D student, also participated in the work of Dr yuan AI from Qufu Normal University and Dr Zhao Yue from the State Key Laboratory of coordination chemistry The above research work has been greatly supported by the talent support program of Nanjing University, the youth thousand program of the Central Organization Department, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the State Key Laboratory of coordination chemistry Corresponding author: Xie Jin, associate professor, Zhu Chengjian