ORIGINAL PAPER One-pot oxidative Groebke–Blackburn–Bienayme reaction of alcohols: using bio-supported and magnetically recyclable Fe 2 O 3 @cellulose and Fe 2 O 3 @cellulose–SO 3 H nanocomposites for the synthesis of 3- aminoimidazo[1,2-a]pyridines Ahmad Shaabani 1 • Hamed Nosrati 1 • Zeinab Hezarkhani 1 • Ronak Afshari 1 Received: 12 August 2016 / Accepted: 14 March 2018 / Published online: 21 June 2018 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract One-pot oxidative Groebke–Blackburn–Bienayme three-component reaction has been successfully developed with primary alcohols instead of their corresponding aldehydes in the presence of recyclable Fe 2 O 3 @cellulose and Fe 2 O 3 @cellulose– SO 3 H catalysts. In this work, an efficient protocol for the oxidative synthesis of 3-aminoimidazo[1,2-a]pyridines via an alcohol, 2-aminopyridine, and an isocyanide in excellent yields in the presence of a catalytic amount of Fe 2 O 3 @cellulose or Fe 2 O 3 @cellulose–SO 3 H as magnetically recoverable heterogeneous catalysts is described. The reaction workup is simple and the catalysts can be easily magnetically separated from the reaction medium and reused in subsequent reactions. Graphical abstract Keywords Cellulose Á Bio-supported catalyst Á Fe 2 O 3 @cellulose Á Fe 2 O 3 @cellulose–SO 3 H Á Magnetite nanoparticles Introduction Multicomponent reactions (MCRs) are fast and selective synthetic methods for the synthesis of large libraries of organic molecules. MCRs are of significant importance in medicinal chemistry because of: (1) their convergent nat- ure, superior atom economy, and straightforward experi- mental procedures and (2) their value to the pharmaceutical industry for the generation of a large ensemble of low- molecular weight compounds through combinatorial strategy and parallel synthesis. MCRs involving isocyanide functional groups (IMCRs) have been investigated inten- sively during the past two decades. IMCRs are among the most versatile, in terms of the number and variety, gener- ated compounds. Carbonyl compounds are one of the main components of IMCRs, but unfortunately this limits the versatility of these reactions. To solve this issue, very recently it has been shown that replacing aldehydes with alcohols could considerably widen the diversity of well- known aldehyde-based multicomponent reactions. The mentioned reactions, known as tandem oxidation/MCR, can be done in organic synthesis by oxidation of alcohols to related carbonyl compounds [1–4]. The successful exam- ples using the tandem oxidation/MCR strategy were done by various catalysts [5, 6]. & Ahmad Shaabani a-shaabani@sbu.ac.ir 1 Faculty of Chemistry, Shahid Beheshti University, G. C., P. O. Box 19396-4716, Tehran, Iran 123 Monatshefte für Chemie - Chemical Monthly (2018) 149:1459–1467 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00706-018-2182-2