Alicyclic alkenes are reacted with s-tetrazines or 1,3,4-triazines to give fused aza or diaza-1,3-dienes which are further reacted with alkenes, thermally or under high pressure conditions (8-14 kbar), to form aza-bridged or diaza-bridged Diels−Alder products of rigid structure, some bearing multifunctionality, eg ligand + chromophore.Developing ways to couple different alicyclic alkenes together as the basis for the production of rigid products lies at the heart of our newly announced building BLOCK approach to ribbon molecule synthesis. The initial work featured the coupling of alkenes with ester-activated cyclobutene epoxides (the ACE reaction). 2 More recently, the aziridine equivalent (the aza-ACE reaction) has been realised and the thermally generated 1,3-dipole used as the cycloaddition reagent to link with alkenes (Scheme 1, top). 3 We now report that s-tetrazines and 1,3,4-triazines can be used to provide a Diels−Alder coupling process as an alternative method for assembling norbornene BLOCKs into rigidly constructed products, this time containing an azabicyclo[2.2.2]octene or diazabicyclo[2.2.2]octene as the rigid linking subunit (Scheme 1, bottom).
Scheme 1The present coupling method exploits the ability of inverse electrondemand heterocycles 4 to react with ring-strained alkenes to produce fused aza-1,3-dienes which can be stored (if stable) as BLOCKs and made to react further with the same or other ring-strained dienophiles to produce Diels−Alder coupled products. The success of the reaction with s-tetrazines depended on the suppression of the prototropic rearrangement of 4,5-dihydropyridazines 3 (Diels−Alder active) to their 1,4-isomers 5 (Diels−Alder inactive) (Scheme 2). 5 This was achieved simply by the addition of triethylamine to the reaction mixture. Where the dihydropyridazine BLOCK is produced from norbornenes, the second cycloaddition step is best conducted at room temperature under high pressure conditions. 7 We were not concerned about such rearrangements in our earlier work on fused 3,6-dipyridylpyridazines 6, since both isomers produce the same oxidised ligand. 8Reaction of norbornene 1 (as the prototype A-BLOCK) with 3,6-di(2'-pyridyl)-s-tetrazine 2b (triethylamine, CH 2 Cl 2 , 2h, RT) formed the 3,4-dihydropyridazine 3b (1,3-diene, B-BLOCK). Without isolation, 3b was treated with a variety of dienophiles 7-10 (second dienophilic A-BLOCK, 2-3 equivalents excess) under high pressure (8-14 kbar, 16h) 7 to form the A+B coupled products 11-14 (see Table 1). 9 The stereochemistry of these coupled products was assigned on the basis of two distinctive 1 H NMR probes: the nOe between the endo-protons (cf Ha, Hb in 11) of the central diazabicyclo[2.2.2]octene ring and the upfield shift of the inward-facing methylene bridge proton when it is proximate to the shielding effect of the diazo bridge.The most significant feature of these coupling reactions was the high diastereoselectivity with single products formed in all cases: formation of products with exo-stereochemistry occurred with simple di...