One General Approach Building Bulky Ketones Utilizing Radical Sorting Effect

The construction of ketones with bulky units is a long-standing challenge for established nucleophilic addition or transient metal catalyzed cross coupling. In this work, a different route is reported to build bulky ketones ab initio that exploits the radical sorting effect in the three-component cross coupling with electro-Ni catalysis. The sorting effect enables selective construction of ketones including all possible combinations of primary, secondary, and tertiary alkyl groups. In particular, the radical sorting pathway allows for efficient CO utilization and synthesis of 13C labelled ketones with a minimum amount of 13CO. In addition, square wave voltammetry was adopted as a quick tool to identify the catalyst both driving electron transfer and bond formation.