FULL PAPER DOI: 10.1002/ejoc.201400120 Synthesis and Selected Reactivity Studies of a Dissymmetric (Phosphinoylmethylpyridine N-Oxide) Methylamine Platform Sabrina Ouizem, [a] Sylvie L. Pailloux, [a] Alisha D. Ray, [a] Eileen N. Duesler, [a] Diane A. Dickie, [a] Robert T. Paine,* [a] and Benjamin P. Hay [b] Keywords: N ligands / Chelates / Ligand design / Lanthanides / Nitrogen oxides Efficient syntheses for the precursor molecules, 2-{6-[((di- phenylphosphoryl)methyl)pyridin-2-yl]methyl}isoindoline- 1,3-dione (2), 2-[(1,3-dioxoisoindolin-2-yl)methyl]-6-[(di- phenylphosphoryl)methyl]pyridine 1-oxide (3), and their 6- [bis(2-(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)phosphoryl]methyl analogues are reported along with their transformations into the dis- symmetric ligands, [(6-(aminomethyl)pyridin-2-yl)methyl]di- phenylphosphine oxide (4), 2-(aminomethyl)-6-[(diphenyl- phosphoryl)methyl]pyridine 1-oxide (5) and 2-(aminometh- yl)-6-{[bis(2-(trifluoromethyl)phenyl)phosphoryl]methyl}- pyridine 1-oxide ( 5-F). Selected reactivity of the amino- methyl substituent of 4 and 5, as well as complexation reac- Introduction Organic chelating ligands have been employed for many years as critical enabling components in metal ion analyti- cal detection schemes and solvent extraction-based separa- tion processes. In particular, there has been much interest given to the development of robust chelating ligands for the separation of chemically similar f-block ions present in highly acidic aqueous nuclear process solutions. [1] In ad- dition, renewed interest in the reclamation of rare-earth ions from low-grade ores and recycle materials [2] has also stimulated parallel growth in the design and synthesis of selective chelating ligands for this application. As part of efforts to more fully describe factors that control ligand chelate interactions on f-block element ions, we have pre- viously described syntheses for multidonor site molecules based upon pyridine and pyridine N-oxide platforms decor- ated with phosphine oxide [3] and amide [4] functional groups. In the former class of compounds, this included representa- tives illustrated by AE (Figure 1). Examples of A and C were found to produce strong bidentate O N O P binding con- [a] Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA E-mail: rtpaine@unm.edu www.unm.edu/~rtpaine/ [b] Chemical Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, P. O. Box 2008, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 37831, USA E-mail: haybp@ornl.gov Supporting information for this article is available on the WWW under http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejoc.201400120. © 2014 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim Eur. J. Org. Chem. 2014, 3132–3148 3132 tions of several of the compounds with lanthanide(III) ions are described. Molecular structures of three uniquely dif- ferent complexes, {Pr{2-[HC(O)N(H)CH 2 ]-6-[Ph 2 P(O)CH 2 ]- C 5 H 3 NO}(NO 3 ) 3 (MeOH)} 2 , {Eu{2-[(Me 2 N) 2 CN(H + )CH 2 ]-6- [Ph 2 P(O)CH 2 ]C 5 H 3 N(H) + }(NO 3 ) 4 (OMe)} and {Er{2-[(C 8 H 4 O 2 )- NCH 2 ]-6-[Ph 2 P(O)CH 2 ]C 5 H 3 N(O)}(NO 3 ) 3 (MeOH)}·(CH 3 ) 2 - CO, have been determined by single-crystal X-ray diffrac- tion methods. The observed and computationally modeled structures that employ bidentate and tridentate ligand/metal interactions are compared. These results suggest further ligand modifications that should provide improved solvent extraction reagents. ditions with lanthanide (Ln) ions, whereas E was observed to form tridentate O N O P O P interactions. Unexpectedly, in the presence of two or more equivalents of ligand, these neutral molecules were observed to partially or totally dis- place charge-compensating anions, for example nitrate, from the inner coordination sphere of the Ln III cations. Ex- amination of the solvent extraction behavior of these com- pounds revealed that examples of C and E display particu- larly favorable performance including increasing extraction efficiency with increasing nitric acid concentration up to ca. 1 . [5] This led to interest in possible applications for these ligands in advanced separation schemes wherein the ligands would be incorporated into an ionic liquid solvent or onto a solid support. However, before such systems can be devel- oped and evaluated, it is necessary to explore reaction chemistry for the platforms that will facilitate these efforts. Figure 1. Generalized structures for ligand types AE.