Health Dictionary
Reliable, easy-to-read patient information on common medical conditions — written in plain language, free of jargon, and grounded in current evidence. Browse the most frequent diagnoses, understand what they mean for everyday life, and learn which steps and questions help you have a focused conversation with your doctor.
Gilman reagent
Introduction
A Gilman reagent is a lithium and copper (diorganocopper) reagent compound, R2CuLi, where R is an organic radical. These are useful because they react with chlorides, bromides, and iodides to replace the halide group with an R group. This is extremely useful in creating larger molecules from smaller ones.
These reagents were discovered by Henry Gilman. Lithium dimethylcopper (CH3)2CuLi can be prepared by adding copper(I) iodide to methyl lithium in tetrahydrofuran at -78°C. In the reaction depicted in scheme 1 [1] the Gilman reagent is a methylating reagent reacting with an alkyne in an conjugate addition and the negative charge is trapped in a nucleophilic acyl substitution with the ester group forming a cyclic enone.
File:Gilman reaction example.png
References
References
- ↑ Modern Organocopper Chemistry, N. Krause Ed. Wiley-VCH, 2002.
Template:Organometallics Template:Jb1 Template:WikiDoc Sources
Editor-In-Chief: C. Michael Gibson, M.S., M.D. [1]