Concept

Carbon–hydrogen bond activation

Summary
In organic chemistry, carbon–hydrogen bond functionalization ( functionalization) is a type of organic reaction in which a carbon–hydrogen bond is cleaved and replaced with a bond (where X is usually carbon, oxygen, or nitrogen). The term usually implies that a transition metal is involved in the cleavage process. Reactions classified by the term typically involve the hydrocarbon first to react with a metal catalyst to create an organometallic complex in which the hydrocarbon is coordinated to the inner-sphere of a metal, either via an intermediate "alkane or arene complex" or as a transition state leading to a "" intermediate. The intermediate of this first step (known as activation and sometimes used interchangeably with functionalization) can then undergo subsequent reactions to produce the functionalized product. Important to this definition is the requirement that during the cleavage event, the hydrocarbyl species remains associated in the inner-sphere and under the influence of "M". As an alternative definition, other authors use the term functionalization to mean any organic transformation in which the net result is the transformation of a relatively inert bond into a bond (i.e., a functional group), irrespective of the reaction mechanism (or with an agnostic attitude towards it). In particular, this definition does not require a transition metal coordination to the hydrocarbon in the mechanism. This broader definition includes the narrower definition given above as a subset. However, this definition would also include iron-catalyzed alkane functionalization reaction that proceed through the oxygen rebound mechanism (e.g. cytochrome P450 enzymes and their synthetic analogues), in which a metal–carbon bond is not believed to be involved. Likewise, the ligand-based reactivity of many metal carbene species with hydrocarbons would also fall under this category, although some cases are mechanistically ambiguous.
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