A new strategy has been developed for reductive amination of aldehydes and ketones with the InCl3/Et3SiH/MeOH system, which is a nontoxic system with highly chemoselective and nonwater sensitive properties. The methodology can be applied to a variety of cyclic, acyclic, aromatic, and aliphatic amines. Functionalities including ester, hydroxyl, carboxylic acid, and olefin are found to be stable under our conditions. The reaction shows a first-order kinetics profile with respect to both InCl3 and Et3SiH. Spectroscopic techniques such as NMR and ESI-MS have been employed to probe the active and resulting species arising from InCl3 and Et3SiH in MeOH, which are important in deriving a mechanistic proposal. In the ESI-MS studies, we have first discovered the existence of stable methanol-coordinated indium(III) species which are presumably responsible for the gentle generation of indium hydride at room temperature. The solvent attribution was crucial in tuning the reactivity of [In-H] species, leading to the establishment of mild reaction conditions. The system is superior in flexible tuning of hydride reactivity, resulting in the system being highly chemoselective.

A robust and reliable method has been developed for reductive amination of primary amines with various aldehydes and ketones using Zn(ClO(4))(2) x 6 H(2)O as a catalyst. [In-H] generated in situ via a combination of InCl(3) and Et(3)SiH is employed as an effective reducing system. A variety of secondary amines can be synthesized in a one-pot procedure in excellent yields.