An Easy Approach to Obtain Alcohol-Amines by Reduction of Alcohol Functionalized Imines

The reduction of functionalized imines to yield amines is often an intricate task, since most of the methods described in the literature to reduce imines to amines do not take into account that many reducing agents have also basic character. In this way, iminic compounds that have phenol functions usually produce the phenolic salt of the precursor when they are treated with a basic reducing agent, but not the desired amine. In this work, we describe an easy way of isolating very pure aminic compounds with alcoholic functions in its structure from the corresponding iminic compounds, by using NaBH4 as a reducing agent, and avoiding tedious chromatography or multiple solvent extraction steps.