Homoleptic octahedral Co(II) complexes as precatalysts for regioselective hydroboration of alkenes with high turnover frequencies

Homoleptic complexes adopting octahedral coordination modes are usually less active in catalysis due to the saturated coordination around metal centers that prevents substrate activation in a catalytic event. In this work, we demonstrated that a homoleptic octahedral cobalt complex (1) of 4′-pyridyl-2,2′;6′,2′′-terpyridine that experienced monoprotonation at the non-coordinating pyridyl moiety upon crystallization could serve as a highly efficient precatalyst for the hydroboration of styrene derivatives with Markovnikov selectivity. The solid-state structure of this precatalyst along with relevant homoleptic Co(II) and Fe(II) complexes has been characterized by X-ray crystallography. In the solid state, 1 features one-dimensional hydrogen-bonded chains that are further stacked by interchain π⋯π interactions. The newly synthesized complexes (1–3) along with several known analogues (4–6) were examined as precatalysts for the hydroboration of alkenes. The best-performing system, 1/KO(t)Bu was found to promote Markovnikov hydroboration of substituted styrenes with high turnover frequencies (TOFs) up to ∼47 000 h(−1), comparable to the most efficient polymeric catalyst [Co(pytpy)Cl(2)](n) reported to date. Although some limitations in substrate scope as well as functional group tolerance exist, the catalyst shows good promise for several relevant hydrofunctionaliation reactions.