Alkene
isomerization can be an atom-economical approach to generating
a wide range of alkene intermediates for synthesis, but fully equilibrated
mixtures of disubstituted internal alkenes typically contain significant amounts of the positional
as well as geometric (E and Z) isomers.
Most classical catalyst systems for alkene isomerization struggle
to kinetically control either positional or E/Z isomerism. We report coordinatively unsaturated, formally
16-electron Cp*Ru catalyst 5, which facilitates simultaneous
regio- and stereoselective isomerization of linear 1-alkenes to their
internal analogues, providing consistent yields of (E)-2-alkenes greater than 95%. Because nitrile-free catalyst 5 is more than 400 times faster than previously published
nitrile-containing analogues 2 + 2a, very
reasonable 0.1–0.5 mol % loadings of 5 complete
ambient-temperature reactions within 15 min to 4 h. UV–vis,
NMR, and computational studies depict the imidazolyl fragment on the
phosphine as a hemilabile, four-electron donor in κ2-P,N coordination. For the first
time, we show direct experimental evidence that the PN ligand has
accepted a proton from the substrate by characterizing the intermediate
Cp*Ru[η3-allyl][κ1-P)P–N+H], which highlights the essential role of
the bifunctional ligand in promoting rapid and selective alkene isomerizations.
Moreover, kinetic studies and computations reveal the role of alkene
binding in selectivity of unsaturated catalyst 5.