The treatment of alkyl 2-chloroacetoacetate with carbohydrazide, succinic or adipic dihydrazide produces the relevant a,a'-dichlorobishydrazones. In the presence of sodium carbonate, these compounds react at room temperature with b-diketones, b-ketoesters or b-ketoamides to give rise to functionalized 1-carbonylaminopyrrole rings spaced by a variable number of methylene groups.The pyrrole ring represents a very important skeleton in organic, polymeric, natural, biological, medicinal and agricultural products. 1 In particular, 1-aminopyrrole derivatives seem to be quite difficult to prepare by Knorr and its modified procedures, mainly due to the severe reaction conditions and/or the formation of dihydropyridazine byproducts. The limited presence of 1-aminopyrroles in the literature can be ascribed to a few procedures existing for their preparation. 2,3 In previous papers, we reported the mild and convenient one-pot synthesis of polysubstituted monocyclic 1-aminopyrrole derivatives by reaction of conjugated azoalkenes with various compounds containing activated methylene or methine groups. 4 We now report an efficient simultaneous closure of polysubstituted 1-aminopyrrole rings spaced by a variable number of methylene groups by preliminary reaction of alkyl 2-chloroacetoacetate with different dihydrazides to give the corresponding a,a'-dichlorobishydrazones and subsequent treatment with bdiketones, b-ketoesters or b-ketoamides through the corresponding conjugated azoalkene intermediates.Initially, we treated methyl 2-chloroacetoacetate 1a with carbohydrazide 2a obtaining dimethyl (a,a'-dichloroacetoacetate)carbobishydrazone 3a (see Scheme 1 and Table). In the presence of sodium carbonate, this last compound reacts in THF at room temperature with two equivalents of benzoylacetone 5a or acetoacetanilide 5b affording directly the corresponding N,N'-di(1H-pyrrol-1-yl)ureas 6a-b (see Scheme 1 and Table). 5 The regiochemistry of 6a is clearly shown by 1 H-and 13 C-NMR analysis in accordance with our previous findings. 6 Likely, this latter reaction passes through the conjugated azoalkene intermediate 4 generated in situ, as manifested by the appearance of the red colour typical of these compounds when the base-promoted dehydrohalogenation occurs and then by the turning to colourlessness when the same compounds lose the conjugated double bonds by addition of the b-dicarbonyl derivative. This hypothesis is also supported by the isolation of a similar entity in the reaction reported in Scheme 2. 5 We then tried successfully analogous reactions between methyl 1a or ethyl 2-chloroacetoacetate 1b and succinic 2b or adipic dihydrazide 2c producing dialkyl (a,a'-
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