N‐Atom Deletion in Nitrogen Heterocycles

Abstract Excising the nitrogen in secondary amines, and coupling the two residual fragments is a skeletal editing strategy that can be used to construct molecules with new skeletons, but which has been largely unexplored. Here we report a versatile method of N‐atom excision from N‐heterocycles. The process uses readily available N‐heterocycles as substrates, and proceeds by N‐sulfonylazidonation followed by the rearrangement of sulfamoyl azide intermediates, providing various cyclic products. Examples are provided of deletion of nitrogen from natural products, synthesis of chiral O‐heterocycles from commercially available chiral β‐amino alcohols, formal inert C−H functionalization through a sequence of N‐directed C−H functionalization and N‐atom deletion reactions in which the N‐atom can serve as a traceless directing group.