Electronic Supplementary Material (ESI) for Chemical Science. This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2018 Mechanistic insights into boron-catalysed direct amidation reactions Sergey Arkhipenko,a Marco T. Sabatini,b Andrei Batsanov,a Valerija Karaluka,b Tom D. Sheppard,b Henry S. Rzepac and Andrew Whitinga* aCentre for Sustainable Chemical Processes, Department of Chemistry, Durham University, Science Site, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK. Email:
[email protected] bDepartment of Chemistry, University College London, 20 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0AJ, UK. cDepartment of Chemistry, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London, SW7 2AZ, UK. Contents Page 1. General experimental 2 2. Synthetic procedures and compound characterisation§ 2.A. Reaction of monomeric acyloxyboron species with amines 3 2.B. Synthesis of borinic acids and studies of their interactions 6 with amines and carboxylic acids 2.C. Interactions of boronic acids with amines and carboxylic acids 10 2.D. Interaction of B2O3 and B(OH)3 with amines and carboxylic acids 21 2.E. Kinetic studies 22 3. Tabulated summary of spectroscopic data 29 4. X-ray crystallographic information# 30 5. References 36 §Note that all NMR data and .cif crystallographic data is available for download from site: DOI: 10.14469/hpc/1620 and sub-collections therein. GENERAL EXPERIMENTAL All starting materials and solvents were obtained commercially from standard chemical suppliers and were used as received unless otherwise stated. Dry solvents were prepared using the Innovative Technology Inc. solvent purification system, or dried by known methods, including standing over 4 Å molecular sieves for 24 h in the case of toluene and CDCl3.