Ring closure to a pyrrole

The nitrogen of an imine formed at one end of a 1,4-dicarbonyl closes onto the other carbonyl, losing water to give a pyrrole.

mechanism writtenBalanced: every atom is accounted for

What it needs, and what it gives

Reaction class: Cyclocondensation
Typical conditions: Warm, usually with a trace of acid. This is the second half of the Paal-Knorr synthesis.
Mass balance: balanced — the co-products are written out, not dropped
Mechanism: none written

Conditions are what the literature ordinarily uses, recorded so you can see whether yours are in the usual range. They are not a procedure and they are not scaled to your flask.

How it is thought to happen

No mechanism is written for this class

The transformation is applied and tested, but no canonical pathway has been written for it yet. Rather than generate a plausible-looking set of arrows, the platform offers nothing here. What it does claim — which bonds change — is read from the transformation itself and does not depend on a mechanism.

Try it on your own structures

Enter your reactants in the Reaction Lab. If this transformation matches what you drew, it is applied and the outcome is shown next to the records that back it — with the count of documented reactions doing the same thing on substrates like yours, rather than a confidence score.

Open the Reaction Lab Browse recorded reactions