Wherefore Art Thou Copper? Structures and Reaction Mechanisms of Organocuprate Clusters in Organic Chemistry

Organocopper reagents provide the most general synthetic tools in organic chemistry for nucleophilic delivery of hard carbanions to electrophilic carbon centers. A number of structural and mechanistic studies have been reported and have led to a wide variety of mechanistic proposals, some of which might even be contradictory to others. With the recent advent of physical and theoretical methodologies, the accumulated knowledge on organocopper chemistry is being put together into a few major mechanistic principles. This review will summarize first the general structural features of organocopper compounds and the previous mechanistic arguments, and then describe the most recent mechanistic pictures obtained through high-level quantum mechanical calculations for three typical organocuprate reactions, carbocupration, conjugate addition, and S(N)2 alkylation. The unified view on the nucleophilic reactivities of metal organocuprate clusters thus obtained has indicated that organocuprate chemistry represents an intricate example of molecular recognition and supramolecular chemistry, which chemists have long exploited without knowing it. Reasoning about the uniqueness of the copper atom among neighboring metal elements in the periodic table will be presented.