P r e p a r a t i o n a n d A l l y l a t i o n o f E n a m i d e s a n d E n e c a r b a m a t e s Abstract: Reductive acylation of oximes and oxime carbonates can be effected with iron powder in the presence of an acid chloride or a chloroformate to produce enamides or enecarbamates.Enamides have been widely used as intermediates in organic synthesis. For example, enamides are valuable precursors for generation of N-acyliminium ions, 1,2 and have also been utilized recently in asymmetric hydrogenation reactions to prepare N-acyl derivatives of chiral amines. 3 Enamides have been synthesized by a variety of methods, including the Curtius rearrangment, 4 by direct addition of amides to alkynes, 5 and by transition-metal-promoted coupling of vinyl halides with amides. 6 Another common method for the preparation of enamides is simply to Nacylate an imine with an acid halide or an acid anhydride. 7 However, this methodology is only practicable for synthesis of tertiary enamides derived from N-alkyl-or N-arylsubstituted imines due to the difficulty in condensing ammonia with aldehydes or ketones to form simple unsubstituted imines. 8In 1975 Barton et al. demonstrated that ketoximes, as well as their O-acyl and O-alkyl derivatives, could be converted into secondary acetyl enamides in excellent yields by heating at reflux with acetic anhydride in pyridine. 9 A free radical mechanism was postulated for this transformation. In addition, it was found that treatment of ketoximes with acetic anhydride in the presence of stoichiometric amounts of metals such as Cr(II) and Ti(III) also affords the corresponding enamides. More recently, Burk and coworkers reported that acetyl enamides can be prepared in moderate to good yields from ketoximes by heating at 70°C in toluene-acetic anhydride in the presence of inexpensive iron powder (Scheme 1). 10 In an improvement of this methodology, Zhang and Casalnuovo found that these reactions can be effected at room temperature if N,N-dimethylformamide is used as solvent, and also that the reaction is initiated by addition of a catalytic amount of chlorotrimethylsilane. 3g It might be noted that to date the methodology has only been applied to ketoximes derived from aryl or hindered ketones. 3g,10