Alcohols, homoallylic, chiral with allylic organometallics

Allylic organometallics modified at the metal center by chiral adjuvants add to aldehydes and ketones to provide optically active homoallylic alcohols. This process has been described for reagents containing boron, tin and chromium metal centers. Gore and coworkers have shown that a chromium-mediated addition reaction of allylic bromides to simple aldehydes that uses a complex of lithium N-methyl-norephedrine and chromium(Il) chloride occurs with modest (6-16% ee) enantioselectivity (equation 61, Table 8). 

A number of highly enantioselective chiral allyl organometallic reagents have been described in the literature. These are of considerable interest both for the asymmetric synthesis of homoallyl alcohols as well as in double asymmetric reactions with chiral C=X electrophiles. - Two distinct groups of chiral allyl metal reagents can be identified those with conventional, easily introduced chiral auxiliaries and ones in which the center of chirality is a structural component of the reagent (e.g. allyl metal compounds with substituents at C-1). These are discussed separately in the sections that follow. 

Amino aldehydes provide useful starting materials for the sequence of Scheme 11.3 because they can easily be prepared from a-amino acids in enantiomerically pure forms and are, therefore, useful chiral building blocks.18 The addition of organometallic allylic reagents (including Zn, used in the reaction described) to such compounds can produce homoallylic alcohols 13 with a high anh-diastereoselectivity. 

Mechanistically related to the Mukaiyama aldol reaction, the carbonyl ene reaction is the reaction between an alkene bearing an allylic hydrogen and a carbonyl compound, to afford homoallylic alcohols. This reaction is potentially 100% atom efficient, and should be a valuable alternative to the addition of organometallic species to carbonyl substrates. However, the carbonyl ene reaction is of limited substrate scope and works generally well in an intermolecular manner only with activated substrates, typically 1,1-disubstituted alkenes and electron-deficient aldehydes (glyoxylate esters, fluoral, a,p-unsaturated aldehydes, etc.), in the presence of Lewis acids. The first use of chiral catalyst for asymmetric carbonyl ene was presented by Mikami et al. in 1989. ° By using a catalytic amount of titanium complexes prepared in situ from a 1 1 ratio of (rPrO)2titaniumX2 (X = Cl or Br) and optically pure BINOL, the homoallylic alcohols 70a,b were obtained in... 

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