I have seen a number of papers in recent years describing the use of CDI and some interesting additional mechanistic insights have been reported ...

There have of course been many many papers in recent years discussing flow chemistry and its applications across scales from discovery through to full commercial manufacture.

I came across an intriguing paper (T Sela and A Vigalok, Org Lett, 2014, 16, 1964) where the authors investigated a number of reactions ‘on water’ and compared them when conducted ‘on liquids’ to ascertain if there was a particular attribute that water brought to the chemistry.

I was looking through SYNFACTS recently and noted the Petasis Borono-Mannich reaction (SYNFACTS, 2014, 10, (2), 134) which reviewed a paper from Org Lett, 2013, 15, 5944.

OPRD has just published as an ASAP article a long and very comprehensive multi-author review (with hundreds of up-to-date references) showing the state of the art in PAT. (Levente S; doi 10.1021/op500261y). It is particularly strong in crystallisation technologies and has some good industrial case studies. The review forms part of a special feature section devoted to PAT which will appear in the Jan 2015 edition of OPRD.

Heterogeneous catalytic hydrogenation is of course a much-used chemical reaction and very efficiently delivers product with high atom economy.  The chemo- and stereoselectivity has been studied many times over the years and is in general fairly predictable based on steric impediment and the ability of the substrate to approach the catalyst surface for hydrogen transfer.

J L G Ruano et al published the base-catalysed formation of aldimines (JACS, 2014, 136, 1082) wherein they use pyrrolidine or anthranilic acid as organocatalyst to promote the formation of the aldimines between aldehydes and sulfonamides, sulfinamides and primary amines.

I have previously mentioned the use of frustrated Lewis pairs (FLPs) for the activation of hydrogen to catalyse reduction, typically of imines to amines.