Possibly because homogeneous palladium catalysts are not typical borrowing hydrogen catalysts and ligands are thus ineffective in catalyst activation under conventional anaerobic conditions, they had not been used in the N-alkylation reactions of amines/amides with alcohols in the past. By employing the aerobic relay race methodol- ogy with Pd-catalyzed aerobic alcohol oxidation being a more effective protocol for alcohol activation, ligand-free homogeneous palladiums are successfully used as active catalysts in the dehydrative N-alkylation reactions, giving high yields and selectivities of the alkylated amides and amines. Mechanistic studies implied that the reaction most probably proceeds via the novel relay race mechanism we recently discovered and proposed.
