Years ago, when Iain Watson was in my lab, we looked at palladium-catalyzed allylic amination. We came to the conclusion that this reaction was far more nuanced than people had thought (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja055288c?journalCode=jacsat). Under acidic conditions, the process is under thermodynamic control and linear product originates from isomerization of kinetically formed branched allyl amine. The addition of base naturally suppresses this process and one can then isolate the branched derivative. I asked our grad students to identify the origins of this selectivity as part of a cumulative examination last December. I received some very reasonable proposals, but none was close to what is actually at play in this system. This is fine, but it exposes an interesting pedagogical challenge: people rarely turn to thermodynamic control as their first choice for explaining reaction outcomes. I suppose we are “wired” to seek uniquely distinct product-specific pathways and do not like to offer explanations that are based on a “path continuum” that is traversed differently according to conditions.
That was a longish prelude to an outstanding paper by Breinbauer and colleagues. My PhD student Frank Lee discussed this work at one of our weekly research updates. Here is another nuance attributable to palladium. What you see is an initial formation of the N-allylated heterocycle, which is followed by an aza-Calisen rearrangement. As a result, the reaction provides access to some interesting side chain-allylated products.