Vanillin: A Promising Biosourced Building Block for the Preparation of Various Heterocycles

Abstract

The preparation of heterocyclic compounds often involves the use of petroleum-based or non-renewable sources. Considering the actual societal and environmental awareness towards sustainable chemistry, new and green sources of organic carbon are sought. In this regard, vanillin is a molecular building block that can be obtained from the depolymerization of lignin. Due to its different functional groups (hydroxyl, aldehyde, and methoxy) vanillin can undergo a variety of reactions leading to various heterocycles such as pyrimidines, quinoxalines, imidazoles or thiazoles to name a few. This mini-review will focus on the preparation of accessible heterocycles building blocks from the vanillin moiety in regard to the medicinal, pharmaceutical, and material fields.

Composite fiber as a multifunctional catalyst support for the upgradation of lignin-based chemicals

“…However, the hydrogenation of VAN is a complicated process, involving the hydrogenation of the aldehyde group in VAN, hydrodeoxygenation of the alcoholic hydroxyl group in VAL to 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (MMP), and deep hydrogenation of the benzene ring. [10][11][12] The occurrence of various side reactions further increases the complexity of producing target products from lignin-derived VAN. According to a number of researches, so far, a variety of precious and non-precious metals have been applied to the catalytic hydrogenation reaction of aromatic lignin monomers and lignin derivatives. [13][14][15][16] A variety of noble metal catalysts and non-noble metal catalysts have been employed to improve the hydrogenation efficiency of VAN and the selectivity towards VAL.…”

“…However, the hydrogenation of VAN is a complicated process, involving the hydrogenation of the aldehyde group in VAN, hydrodeoxygenation of the alcoholic hydroxyl group in VAL to 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (MMP), and deep hydrogenation of the benzene ring. 10–12 The occurrence of various side reactions further increases the complexity of producing target products from lignin-derived VAN.…”

Utilization of vanillin to prepare sulfated Calix[4]resorcinarene as efficient organocatalyst for biodiesel production based on methylation of palmitic acid and oleic acid

“…In this work, we prepared sulfated Calix[4]resorcinarene from vanillin as the starting material due to its highly abundant and relatively cheap resources ($109/kg) in Indonesia [ 47 ]. Vanillin contains aldehyde, hydroxyl and methoxy groups; thus, could be cyclized to form the cyclic Calix[4]resorcinarene structure through a one-pot reaction.…”