Abstract By employing an easily available [Ru (p-cymene) Cl 2] 2/Xantphos/t-BuOK catalyst system, the α-alkylation of ketones was demonstrated by using pyridyl methanol as the alkylating reagents. The synthetic protocol allows synthesizing a wide range of α-pyridyl methylated ketones in reasonable to excellent isolated yields with high atom-efficiency. The transformation is operationally simple, the substrate scope is wide, and the starting ...
