Use
4-Dimethylaminopyridine is highly powerful catalyst of organic synthesis. The treatment of substrates such as alcohols, phenols and amines with acetic anhydride (or acetyl chloride) in the presence of pyridine has provided a general acetylation method since the turn of the 20th century. However, this approach often proves to be unsatisfactory for the acetylation of deactivated substrates. It was not until the late 1960s that certain 4-dialkylaminopyridines were found (independently by two research groups)[1, 2] to be much superior to pyridine as catalysts for difficult acetylations or acylations, in general.
Figure 1 the chemical structure of DMAP
4-Dialkylaminopyridines were soon found to have general applicability for catalysis of a wide variety of reactions. 4-dimethylaminopyridines (DMAP) wide applicability has been frequently reviewed since the first review appeared in 1978. [3] The accelerating pace of reported applications for DMAP and the availability of DMAP in commercial quantities, at modest prices, have continued to stimulate great interest in its use as a catalyst in the fields of organic, polymer, analytical and biochemistry. Today there are thousands of examples of the use of DMAP in far ranging fields of chemistry in both patents and the research literature. Many full-scale production processes utilizing DMAP have been and are being operated. Several pharmaceutical and agricultural products that rely on DMAPs superior catalytic properties in their synthetic sequences have been produced for years. Since 1976 more than 11,000 US patents have been granted which mention DMAP or dimethylaminopyridine.
The functional groups and class of compounds that are involved in the reactions with DMAP include alcohols, amines, arenes, azides, carbenes, enols, epoxides, hydrazines, hydroxylamines, phenols, thiols, lipids, sugars, aminoacids, peptides, alkaloids, steroids, terpenes, and others. Reactions that have been published in the literature using DMAP fall into, but are not limited to, the following types of reactions: Acylation; Acetylation; Alkylation; Benzoylation; Bischler-Naperalski cyclization, Carbonylation; Carbo-diimidation; Cyclization; Dehydration; Esterificaton; Indole Synthesis; Nucleophilic Substitution; Rearrangement; Silylation; Sulfonamidation; Sulfonation; Tritylation; Formylation; Carbamoylation; Phosphorylation; Lactonization; Pivaloylation; Dakin-West Reaction; Baylis-Hillman Reaction.