The use of arylglyoxal as starting material in Passerini and Ugi reactions affords βketoamides. This has allowed to study keto-enol tautomerism in these systems and assess the
way in which the presence of acyloxy or aminoacyl groups bound to the C2 position affects such
tautomerism, and to investigate the reactivity of both the enol and carbonyl forms. In this work we
also prove the versatility of the Passerini reaction, since depending on the conditions to which the
corresponding adducts are subjected different products of synthetic interest can be obtained.
