New strategies in copper-catalyzed oxidative decarboxylation reactions

Carboxylic acids are attractive starting materials in organic synthesis because they are stable, abundant, and inexpensive, yet they provide the opportunity to access more complex and value-added products with high efficiency. Recent methods to utilize carboxylic acids as starting materials have focused on decarboxylative coupling reactions, in which the pairing of an oxidation step with the decarboxylation step leads to functionalized arene or alkane products. In contrast, the ability to decouple these two steps introduces the potential to generate a more diverse array of targets from simple carboxylic acid starting materials. This talk will describe our recent work in this area focusing on the development of new copper-catalyzed dehydrogenative decarboxylation reactions of aliphatic carboxylic acids and the importance of the oxidant in controlling product selectivity.