Revisiting the coupling reaction between 4-aminoantipyrine and phenols: a potential one-pot reaction pathway to 4,11- and 5,12-naphthoxazepine isomers

Abstract

A while ago, this journal ( Canadian Journal of Chemistry) published a set of seminal studies that revealed the underlying mechanism supporting the widely used 4-aminoantipyrine (4-AAP)-based analytical technique for detecting phenols at low levels in domestic water supplies. The current paper revisits these studies, but with a primary focus on an aspect of the mechanism that synthesizes a 6- and a 7-membered heterocyclic ring containing both N and O in a single step. Here we report a rather unusual outcome of this aspect in which, while the same naphthoquinonimide product is produced in the oxidative coupling of 4-AAP to 1-naphthol in aqueous solution and in the condensation of 4-AAP with 1,4-naphthoquinone in chloroform, a similar pair of reactions with 2-naphthol and 1,2-naphthoquinone produces two oxazepine isomers instead. In one isomer, the 4-AAP/naphthol C–N and C–O linkages are at positions 1 and 2 of the naphthyl ring, respectively; in the other isomer, these linkages are at positions 2 and 1, respectively. This unexpected difference in a one-pot reaction at ambient temperature is potentially the flexibility needed to synthesize families of pharmaceutically relevant oxazepines. Spectroscopic features useful for identifying 12 heterocyclic compounds synthesized here, nine of which are new, are also provided.