Open AccessDevelopment of a Scalable and Sublimation-Free Route to MTAD
Author(s) -
Zohaib Siddiqi,
Chad N. Ungarean,
Tanner W. Bingham,
David Šarlah
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
organic process research and development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.904
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1520-586X
pISSN - 1083-6160
DOI - 10.1021/acs.oprd.0c00470
Subject(s) - sublimation (psychology) , reagent , scalability , computer science , chemistry , combinatorial chemistry , recrystallization (geology) , organic chemistry , database , psychology , paleontology , psychotherapist , biology
The cyclic azodicarbonyl 4-methyl-1,2,4-triazoline-3,5-dione (MTAD) is a versatile and powerful reagent used mainly in cycloaddition chemistry. Though known for more than 50 years, its unsafe preparation, as well as purification by sublimation, hampered its widespread applicability on a larger scale. Herein we report a scalable and safe route to MTAD, which avoids the generation of methyl isocyanate. Moreover, we demonstrate that sublimation can be circumvented by the application of judicious oxidation conditions, followed by simple filtration. Overall, up to 25 g of MTAD was prepared in a single batch from commercial starting materials in three steps, with recrystallization serving as the only purification in the sequence. When employed in dearomative methodologies, the MTAD obtained by this protocol displayed synthetic efficiency equivalent to that of MTAD purified by sublimation.