ABSTRACT
Ammonia is the simplest nitrogen-containing compound and an essential nitrogen source in biological and industrial synthesis. In biological synthetic pathways, ammonia is playing a crucial role as a biologically available nitrogen source to produce amino acids, nucleotides, and so on in the nitrogen cycle. Ammonia is an easily available industrially important raw material to synthesize nitrogen-containing molecules. Ammonia and amines are photochemically reactive species acting as a base, a reductant, and a nucleophile. Photoamination of Category III reaction using ammonia and amines as nucleophile has been firstly reported in 1985. The photochemical polar addition (PPA) reactions have been extensively investigated using a variety of nucleophiles such as alcohols, water, cyanide ion, and carboxylic acid. A variety of PPA reactions have been investigated since 1960s. The nucleophilic addition of ammonia and amines occurred for not only the localized cation radicals but also the delocalized cation radicals because of strong nucleophilicity, showing that photoamination has much versatility.
