Room temperature hydrophosphination using a simple iron salen pre-catalyst

Phosphines are fundamentally important to the fine
chemicals, pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries and
most notably for their use as ligands in catalysis. Herein, we
report the first example of the preparation of tertiary
phosphines via alkene hydrophosphination utilizing a
designed iron pre-catalyst. This facile transformation yields
anti-Markovnikov products in high yield using only 0.5 mol%
of an iron salen pre-catalyst at room temperature. The
resulting phosphine products are shown to be excellent proligands
for Fe-catalyzed Negishi cross-coupling.