Primary amines are valuable building blocks for a large number of chemicals, developing efficient synthetic routes toward primary amines and particularly those proceeding under mild conditions are highly desirable and rather challenging. Presented here is a highly efficient procedure enabling itself to proceed in H 2 O using H 2 of 1 atm (0.1 MPa) for the reductive amination of carbonyl compounds. Several palladiumbased nanoparticle (Pd-NP) catalysts were prepared, and one emerged to be the most suitable and classified as nanoparticles, due to its high catalytic activity, reactions were allowed to proceed at room temperature using NH 3 , and the corresponding primary amines can be afforded with yields of up to 99%. Some control reactions were carried out, revealing that H 2 is pivotal for activating the Pd-NPs. The fact that the Pd-NPs can catalyze both reductive amination of carbonyl compounds and hydrogenation of imines proves Pd-NPs to be a dual-function catalyst, and a plausible mechanism was proposed.
In the classical amidation between aromatic ketones and amines, 2.0 equivalents of amines are necessarily required to gain satisfying yields. The specific role of the amine in the direct amidation already puzzled us for a long time. In this work, we disclosed that the amine acts as both reactant and catalyst. Specifically, the determination of reaction intermediates revealed the full mechanism, based on which, the introduction of one equivalent base in the amidation is showcased here that a high yield (∼95 %) can be afforded using only 1.1 equiv. of amine.
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