Archive for May 8th, 2020

Choreographing a chemical ballet: what happens if you change one of the actors?

Friday, May 8th, 2020

Earlier, I explored the choreography or “timing”, of what might be described as the curly arrows for a typical taught reaction mechanism, the 1,4-addition of a nucleophile to an unsaturated carbonyl compound (scheme 1). I am now going to explore the consequences of changing one of the actors by adding the nucleophile to an unsaturated imine rather than carbonyl compound (scheme 2). 

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