Photocatalytic divergent decarboxylative amination: a metal-free access to aliphatic amines and hydrazines

Nitrogen-containing motifs are widely present in natural products, bioactive molecules, and drugs. Accordingly, effective synthetic methods with high efficiency and diversity are highly desirable. Here, we present the invention of a facile, visible light-mediated decarboxylative C(sp3)-N bond-forming reaction by employing abundant carboxylic acids as the feedstock and a commercial diazirine as a nitrogen donor. This process is amenable to access both imines and diaziridines, as the corresponding masked amines and hydrazines, through a selectable single or double nitrogen transfer from the diazirine, respectively. This divergent approach works well in both directions with various alkyl carboxylic acids, including primary, secondary, and tertiary acids, as well as natural products and drugs, thus affording a rapid, metal-free approach to build nitrogen-containing molecule libraries with considerable structural diversity, which could thus benefit the related study in context of chemical biology and drug discovery.