Exploring an Umpolung strategy for quaternization of phosphorus

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

We propose a new, potentially widely-applicable, Umpolung approach for the synthesis of quaternary phosphonium salts R3PR1 X (X = Cl, Br) from phosphine oxides R3PO. The new organic group R1 is introduced via nucleophilic attack on an intermediate halophosphonium salt using a Grignard reagent R1MgX and replaces the traditional phosphine quaternization approach. Consequently, the new method does not suffer from the limited availability of many parent phosphines and is much faster than standard quaternization.