Decarboxylative Functionalizations of Carboxylic Acids

Decarboxylative functionalization of carboxylic acids is an attractive synthetic transformation because carboxylic acid is a fundamental and easily available functional group. Recently, a number of excellent methods for catalytic decarboxylative functionalizations of aliphatic and aromatic carboxylic acids have been reported with transition metal catalysts. However, many challenges still remain in decarboxylative functionalization, such as developing the reaction under metal-free conditions, reactions with tertiary carboxylic acids, and catalytic enantioselective reactions. β-Oxoacids are known to undergo decarboxylation under mild reaction conditions. In the last few years, our research group have studied on the development of novel decarboxylative functionalizations of β-oxoacids and their analogues, especially focusing on reactions with tertiary carboxylic acids under organocatalytic or catalyst free conditions. This article describes our recent research progress on the decarboxylative functionalization of aliphatic carboxylic acids.