Recycling the Waste: The Development of a Catalytic Wittig Reaction Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2009, 48, 6836 –6839

The Wittig Reaction is a chemical reaction of an aldehyde or ketone with a triphenyl phosphonium ylide (often called a Wittig reagent) to give an alkene and triphenylphosphine oxide Wittig reaction

Fig. (8). Catalytic formation of olefins according to experiments performed by Tang et al. [27] with Te based catalysts. (Br(Bu) 2 Te) 2 O Mini-Reviews in Organic Chemistry, 2004, Vol. 1, No. 1

Scheme 1. Proposed catalytic Wittig reaction

J. AM. CHEM. SOC. 2006, 128,

Conclusions The first Wittig reaction catalytic in phosphine has been developed. A variety of heteroaryl, aryl, and alkyl aldehydes could be efficiently converted to the corresponding alkenes in moderate to high yield with the utilization of the phosphine oxide precatalyst 1.