Sodium hydride (NaH) is widely used as a Brønsted base in chemical synthesis and reacts with various Brønsted acids, whereas it rarely behaves as a reducing reagent through delivery of the hydride to polar π electrophiles. This study presents a series of reduction reactions of nitriles, amides, and imines as enabled by NaH in the presence of LiI or NaI. This remarkably simple protocol endows Na...

We report measurements of the negative ion photoelectron spectra of the simple aluminum hydride anions: AlH2(-), AlH3(-), Al2H6(-), Al3H9(-), and Al4H12(-). From these spectra, we measured the vertical detachment energies of the anions, and we estimated the electron affinities of their neutral counterparts. Our results for AlH2(-), AlH3(-), and Al2H6(-) were also compared with previous predicti...

Choline oxidase catalyzes the oxidation of choline to glycine betaine. The reaction includes betaine aldehyde as an intermediate. FAD is reduced by the alcohol substrate, betaine aldehyde intermediate and oxidized by molecular oxygen to give hydrogen peroxide. In this study, the Ser101Ala variant of choline oxidase was prepared to elucidate the contribution of the hydroxyl group of Ser101 in th...

The transition state for beta-hydride elimination in alkyl groups on the Pt(111) surface has been probed by studying the effects of fluorine substitution on the barriers to beta-hydride elimination, DeltaE++(betaH). Four different fluoroalkyl groups have been formed on the Pt(111) surface by dissociative adsorption of four fluoroalkyl iodides: RCH(2)CH(2)-I (R = CF(3), CF(3)CH(2), and CF(3)CF(2...

The FeMoco of nitrogenase is an iron-sulfur cluster with exceptional bond-reducing abilities. ENDOR studies have suggested that E4, the state that binds and reduces N2, contains bridging hydrides as part of the active-site iron-sulfide cluster. However, there are no examples of any isolable iron-sulfide cluster with a hydride, which would test the feasibility of such a species. Here, we describ...

The insertion, elimination and isomerisation of octenes with di-n-octylaluminium hydride [HAl(Oct)2], tri-n-octylaluminium [Al(Oct)3] and sec-octylaluminium species have been studied as individual steps in a putative aluminium based contrathermodynamic olefin isomerisation process. While elimination of 1-octene from [Al(Oct)3] is energetically unfavourable, the process is driven by high tempera...

Abstract: Neurotoxic organotin reagents currently play a key role in radical chemistry. As a result, this is an important area for development of new clean replacement reactions. The pharmaceutical industry in particular has had to avoid use of radical methodology for the formation of carbon–carbon bonds for this reason. With the current dawn in green chemistry, a host of new clean radical meth...

After synthesizing calcium amide (Ca(NH2)2) through the reaction of calcium hydride (CaH2) with ammonia (NH3), the thermal decomposition properties have been examined. The results indicated that Ca(NH2)2 decomposed to calcium imide (CaNH) and NH3 gas with increasing temperature, where the desorption of NH3 started from about 60 °C and peaked around 300 °C in the thermal desorption mass spectra ...

An electrochemical hydride generation (ECHG) technique was developed to improve the determination of thallium by atomic spectrometry. The technique is based on the catholyte variation system for production of thallium hydride. Using Pb-Sn alloy as cathode, a transient peak shaped signal was achieved and its height, the maximum absorbance value, was taken as an analytical parameter. Parameters t...