Coupling without Coupling Reactions: En Route to Developing Phenols as Sustainable Coupling Partners via Dearomatization-Rearomatization Processes

Transition-metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions represent one of the most straightforward and efficient protocols to assemble two different molecular motifs for the construction of carbon-carbon or carbon-heteroatom bonds. Because of their importance and wide applications in pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, materials, etc., cross-coupling reactions have been well recognized in the 2010 Nobel Prize in chemistry. However, in the classical transition-metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions (e.g., the Suzuki-Miyaura, the Buchwald-Hartwig, and the Ullmann cross-coupling reactions), organohalides, which mainly stem from the nonrenewable fossil resources, are often utilized as coupling partners with halide wastes being generated after the reactions. To make cross-coupling reactions more sustainable, we initiated a general research program by employing phenols and cydohexa(e)nones (the reduced forms of phenols) as pivotal feedstocks (coupling partners), instead of the commonly used fossil-derived organohalides, for cross-coupling reactions to build C-O, C-N, and C-C bonds. Phenols (cydohexa(e)nones) are widely available and can be obtained from lignin biomass, highlighting their renewable and sustainable features. Moreover, water is expected to be the only stoichiometric byproduct, thus avoiding halide wastes. Notably, the cross-coupling reactions utilizing phenols/cyclohexa(e)nones are not based on the traditional transition-metal-catalyzed oxidative-addition and reductive-elimination mechanism, but via a novel phenol-cyclohexanone redox couple. This new working mechanism opens up new horizons of designing cross-coupling reactions via simple nucleophilic addition of cyclohexanones along with aromatization processes, thereby simplifying the design and avoiding laborious optimization of transition-metal precursors (e.g., Pd, Ni, Cu, etc.), as well as ligands in dassical transition-metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. Specifically, in this Account, we will summarize and discuss our related research work in the following three categories: formal oxidative couplings of cyclohexa(e)nones, formal reductive couplings of phenols, and formal redox-neutral couplings of phenols. The successes of these research projects clearly demonstrated our initial inspirations and rational designs to develop cross-coupling reactions without the conventional cross-coupling conditions by pushing the reaction frontiers from initial cydohexanones, ultimately, to the sustainable phenol targets.