The interest in azides among organic chemists has been relatively modest due to the reported instability of these compounds. The situation has changed dramatically with the discovery by Sharpless et al. of Cu-catalysed (3+2)-cycloadditions between organic azides and terminal alkynes. The azido- and the alkyne groups are "bioorthogonal", which means they do not interact with living systems, and at the same time they undergo an impressively fast and selective coupling. This type of formal 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition became the most famous example of so-called "click chemistry" (perhaps, the only one known to a non-specialist), and the field of organic azides exploded.
Myriad methods exist, most often using preformed azide-containing reagent.
A classic method for the synthesis of azides is the Dutt–Wormall reaction in which a diazonium salt reacts with a sulfonamide first to a diazoaminosulfinate and then on hydrolysis the azide and a sulfinic acid.
Some azide reactions are shown in the following scheme. Probably the most famous is the reaction with phosphines, which leads to iminophosphoranes 22; these can be hydrolysed into primary amines 23 (the Staudinger reaction), react with carbonyl compounds to give imines 24 (the aza-Wittig reaction), or undergo other transformations. Thermal decomposition of azides gives nitrenes, which participate in a variety of reactions; vinyl azides 19 decompose into 2H-azirines 20. Alkyl azides with low nitrogen-content ((nC + nO) / nN ≥ 3) are relatively stable and decompose only above ca. 175 °C.
The (3+2)-cycloaddition of azides to double or triple bonds is one of the most utilised cycloadditions in organic chemistry and affords triazolines (e.g. 17) or triazoles, respectively. The uncatalysed reaction is a concerted pericyclic process, in which the configuration of the alkene component is transferred to the triazoline product. The Woodward–Hoffmann denomination is [π4s+π2s] and the reaction is symmetry-allowed. According to Sustmann, this is a Type II cycloaddition, which means the two HOMOs and the two LUMOs have comparable energies, and thus both electron-withdrawing and electron-donating substituents may lead to an increase in the reaction rate. The reaction is generally free from significant solvent effects because both the reactants and the transition state (TS) are non-polar.
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