Chiral ketals

Further examination of the chiral ketals reveals that the lone pairs available for reagent coordination are oriented either in a syw or an anti relationship to the neighboring methyl substituents. The influence of the chiral auxiliary over the reaction is now clear. If zinc coordination must occur proximal to the double bond. 

Although the rationalization of the reactivity and selectivity of this particular substrate is distinct from that for chiral ketals 92-95, it still agrees with the mechanistic conclusions gained throughout the study of Simmons-Smith cyclopropa-nations. StOl, the possibility of the existence of a bimetallic transition structure similar to v (see Fig. 3.5) has not been rigorously ruled out. No real changes in the stereochemical rationale of the reaction are required upon substitution of such a bimetallic transition structure. But as will be seen later, the effect of zinc iodide on catalytic cyclopropanations is a clue to the nature of highly selective reaction pathways. A similar but unexplained effect of zinc iodide on these cyclopro-panation may provide further information on the true reactive species. 

The application of auxiliary control in the asymmetric Michael addition of chiral enolates derived from ketones is rare the only example known is the use of (27 ,37 )-2,3-butancdiol as an auxiliary. The ketal of (27 ,37 )-2,3-butanediol with 3-methyl-l,2-cyclohexanedione reacts with 3-buten-2-one using as base a catalytic amount of sodium ethoxide in ethanol195. 

Photodriven reactions of Fischer carbenes with alcohols produces esters, the expected product from nucleophilic addition to ketenes. Hydroxycarbene complexes, generated in situ by protonation of the corresponding ate complex, produced a-hydroxyesters in modest yield (Table 15) [103]. Ketals,presumably formed by thermal decomposition of the carbenes, were major by-products. The discovery that amides were readily converted to aminocarbene complexes [104] resulted in an efficient approach to a-amino acids by photodriven reaction of these aminocarbenes with alcohols (Table 16) [105,106]. a-Alkylation of the (methyl)(dibenzylamino)carbene complex followed by photolysis produced a range of racemic alanine derivatives (Eq. 26). With chiral oxazolidine carbene complexes optically active amino acid derivatives were available (Eq. 27). Since both enantiomers of the optically active chromium aminocarbene are equally available, both the natural S and unnatural R amino acid derivatives are equally... 

The cis-2,3-diaryl-2,3-dihydro-l,4-benzoxathiin is a very unique structural motif. Other than scattered reports in the literature on the formation of this scaffold, there was no effective asymmetric synthesis for it [6]. We explored two major synthetic approaches to realize the key chiral as-diaryl dihydrobenzoxathiin scaffold, as shown in Scheme 5.3. One was the quinone ketal route in which the quinone ketal 13 and the chiral mercaptol alcohol 14 were the key intermediates. The other approach was the stereo- and enantioselective reduction of the diaryl benzoxathiin 16. The key mercaptol alcohol 14 and the diaryl benzoxathiin 16 were both envisioned to be prepared from the key, common iodoketone intermediate 15. 

Compound 22 can be conveniently prepared in multigram quantities and has been found to be useful for assessing the enantiomeric purity of 1,2-glycols. Because the ketal carbon represents a new chiral center, the formation of four diastereomers is possible. However, the diastereomeric pair 23a and 23b (or 23c and 23d) shows 1 1 peak height in 13C NMR or equal peak areas in HPLC the diastereomer composition measured by the ratio of 23a to 23b or 23c to 23d reflects the enantiomer composition of the original 1,2-glycol. 

Chiral acetals/ketals derived from either (R,R)- or (5,5 )-pentanediol have been shown to offer considerable advantages in the synthesis of secondary alcohols with high enantiomeric purity. The reaction of these acetals with a wide variety of carbon nucleophiles in the presence of a Lewis acid results in a highly diastereoselective cleavage of the acetal C-0 bond to give a /1-hydroxy ether, and the desired alcohols can then be obtained by subsequent degradation through simple oxidation elimination. Scheme 2-39 is an example in which H is used as a nucleophile.97... 

Deracemization of lj-diols.1 Ketalization of (-)-menthone (1) with a pro-chiral 1,3-diol (2) results in formation of only two of the four possible diastereomers (3 and 4), which can be separated by chromatography and then hydrolyzed to provide (S)- and (R)- 2 in 92-98% ee. 

When the reaction was applied to a chiral cyclic ketal instead, very low selectiv-ities were obtained. Introduction of chelating substituents into the ketal made improvement possible, though (Scheme 8.14) [23, 26]. 

Acetals and ketals are very important protecting groups in solution-phase synthesis, but only a few constructs have been used as linkers in solid-phase synthesis (Tab. 3.3). The THP-linker (22) (tetrahydropyran) was introduced by Ellman [54] in order to provide a linker allowing the protection of alcohols, phenols and nitrogen functionalities in the presence of pyridinium toluene sulfonate, and the resulting structures are stable towards strong bases and nucleophiles. Other acetal-linkers have also been used for the attachment of alcohols [55, 56]. Formation of diastereomers caused by the chirality of these linkers is certainly a drawback. Other ketal tinkers tike... 

Marinetti [53] and Burk [54] reported the preparation of chiral l,l -bis(phos-phetano)ferrocenes (FerroTANE) independently, in which Et-FerroTANE demonstrated excellent enantioselectivity in the rhodium-catalyzed hydrogenation of itaconates. Zhang has reported a l,T-bis(phospholanyl)ferrocene hgand (f-KetalPhos) with ketal substituents at 3,4-positions [55], which proved an excellent ligand for the enantioselective hydrogenation of a-dehydroamino acid derivatives [56]. 

---