Cascade reactions conjugate Friedel-Crafts

Cascades Initiated by Conjugate Friedel-Crafts Reaction... 

Finally, there is also a relevant example of an intermolecular conjugate Friedel-Crafts/electrophilic amination cascade developed very recently by Melchiorre in which 2-methyl-IH-indole reacted with a variety of a,p-unsatu-rated aldehydes and dialkyl azodicarboxylates in the presence of a primary amine catalyst, leading to the formation of a family of products containing two contiguous stereocenters, one of them a quaternary one (Scheme 7.43). This reaction started with the conjugate addition of 2-methyl-lH-indole to the enal... 

MacMillan and co-workers [79] pioneered the development of entirely organo-catalyzed cascade reactions. In his seminal report, iminium-catalyzed Friedel-Crafts reactions were followed by enamine-catalyzed a-chlorinations (Scheme 13.40). In this same report, an iminium-catalyzed conjugate reduction was followed by an enamine-catalyzed a-chlorination (not shown). In both of these cascade reactions, a single catalyst was used for both the iminium- and enamine-mediated reactions. Alternatively, MacMillan demonstrated that it was possible to use one catalyst for an iminium-catalyzed conjugate reduction and a different catalyst for an enamine-catalyzed a-fluorination (Scheme 13.40) [79]. Such cycle-specific cascade reactions allow access to both the anti (shown) and syn diastereomers of the product simply by using the opposite enantiomer of the catalyst for one of the two reactions in the cascade. 

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