Ligand Effect in Alkali-Metal-Catalyzed Transfer Hydrogenation of Ketones

This work unveils the reactivity patterns, as well as ligand and additive effect on alkali-metal-base-catalyzed transfer hydrogenation of ketones. Crucially to this reactivity is the presence of a Lewis acid (alkali cation), as opposed to a simple base effect. With aryl ketones, the observed reactivity order is Na⁺>Li⁺>K⁺, whereas for aliphatic substrates it follows the expected Lewis acidity, Li⁺>Na⁺>K⁺. Importantly, the reactivity pattern can be drastically changed by adding ligands and additives. Kinetic, labelling, and competition experiments as well as DFT calculations suggested that the reaction proceeds through a concerted direct hydride-transfer mechanism, originally suggested by Woodward. The lithium cation was found to be intrinsically more active than heavier congeners, but in the case of aryl ketones a decrease in reaction rate was observed at ≈40 % conversion with lithium cations. Noncovalent-interaction analysis revealed that this deceleration effect originated from specific noncovalent interactions between the aryl moiety of 1-phenylethanol and the carbonyl group of acetophenone, which stabilize the product in the coordination sphere of lithium and thus poison the catalyst. The ligand/additive effect is a complicated phenomenon that includes a combination of several factors, such as the decrease of activation energy by ligation (confirmed by distortion/interaction calculations of N,N,N’,N’-tetramethylethylenediamine, TMEDA) and the change in relative stabilization of reagents and substrates in the solution and the coordination sphere of the metal. Finally, we observed that lithium-base-catalyzed transfer hydrogenation can be further facilitated by the addition of an inexpensive and benign reagent, LiCl, which likely operates by re-initiating the reaction on a new lithium center.