Synthesis of complex natural products

R B Woodward was one of the leading organic chemists of the middle part of the twenti eth century Known pnmanly for his achievements in the synthesis of complex natural products he was awarded the Nobel Pnze in chemistry in 1965 He entered Massachusetts Institute of Tech nology as a 16 year old freshman in 1933 and four years later was awarded the Ph D While a student there he earned out a synthesis of estrone a female sex hormone The early stages of Woodward s estrone synthesis required the conversion of m methoxybenzaldehyde to m methoxy benzyl cyanide which was accomplished in three steps... 

Many notable examples of the synthesis of complex natural products from optically pure starting materials have been reported (70). One synthesis of considerable interest is that of taxol [33069-62-4] (74), a potent antitumor agent used clinically. The starting material (73) used ia the first total synthesis of taxol is produced ia enantiomericaHy pure form from inexpensive and readily available /-camphor [464-48-2] (72) (73). 

The generality of the dioxahorolane method makes it well-suited for synthesis of complex natural products. For example, Nicolaou et al. have successfully used... 

We will focus on the development of ruthenium-based metathesis precatalysts with enhanced activity and applications to the metathesis of alkenes with nonstandard electronic properties. In the class of molybdenum complexes [7a,g,h] recent research was mainly directed to the development of homochi-ral precatalysts for enantioselective olefin metathesis. This aspect has recently been covered by Schrock and Hoveyda in a short review and will not be discussed here [8h]. In addition, several important special topics have recently been addressed by excellent reviews, e.g., the synthesis of medium-sized rings by RCM [8a], applications of olefin metathesis to carbohydrate chemistry [8b], cross metathesis [8c,d],enyne metathesis [8e,f], ring-rearrangement metathesis [8g], enantioselective metathesis [8h], and applications of metathesis in polymer chemistry (ADMET,ROMP) [8i,j]. Application of olefin metathesis to the total synthesis of complex natural products is covered in the contribution by Mulzer et al. in this volume. 

Whitlock, H.W. (1998) On the Structure of Total Synthesis of Complex Natural Products. Journal... 

Furthermore, iterative approaches are useful methods to construct polyhydroxy chains with 1,2- or 1,3-diol units of any length as chiral precursors for the synthesis of complex natural products [57] because automated synthesis becomes feasible. A preparation of trans-fused polytetrahydropyranes as structural unit for polycyclic ether biotoxines by repeated reaction sequences was recently named reiterative synthesis [58]. 

Primary nitro compounds are good precursors for preparing nitriles and nitrile oxides (Eq. 6.31). The conversion of nitro compounds into nitrile oxides affords an important tool for the synthesis of complex natural products. Nitrile oxides are reactive 1,3-dipoles that form isoxazolines or isoxazoles by the reaction with alkenes or alky nes, respectively. The products are also important precursors for various substrates such as P-amino alcohols, P-hydroxy ketones, P-hydroxy nitriles, and P-hydroxy acids (Scheme 6.3). Many good reviews concerning nitrile oxides in organic synthesis exist some of them are listed here.50-56 Applications of organic synthesis using nitrile oxides are discussed in Section 8.2.2. 

Diels-Alder reactions are one of the most fundamental and useful reactions in synthetic organic chemistry. Various dienes and dienophiles have been employed for this useful reaction.1 Nitroalkenes take part in a host of Diels-Alder reactions in various ways, as outlined in Scheme 8.1. Various substituted nitroalkenes and dienes have been employed for this reaction without any substantial improvement in the original discovery of Alder and coworkers.2 Nitrodienes can also serve as 4ti-components for reverse electron demand in Diels-Alder reactions. Because the nitro group is converted into various functional groups, as discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, the Diels-Alder reaction of nitroalkenes has been frequently used in synthesis of complex natural products. Recently, Denmark and coworkers have developed [4+2] cycloaddition using nitroalkenes as heterodienes it provides an excellent method for the preparation of heterocyclic compounds, including pyrrolizidine alkaloids. This is discussed in Section 8.3. 

In a series of publications over the past few years, the group of Barriault has reported on microwave-assisted tandem oxy-Cope/Claisen/ene and closely related reactions [175-178], These pericyclic transformations typically proceed in a highly stereoselective fashion and can be exploited for the synthesis of complex natural products possessing decalin skeletons, such as the abietane diterpene wiedamannic... 

In recent years, the related C-H insertion chemistry of nitrenes has gained considerable momentum.36 Effective chiral catalysts have been developed as well as new methods for generation of the nitrene precursors. Even more impressive has been the application of this chemistry to the synthesis of complex natural products. The scope of this chemistry is described in Section 10.04.4. 

While transition metal-catalyzed hydroboration is a well-established reaction, the same cannot be said for the transition metal-catalyzed hydroalumination. The synthetic utility of this reaction is only just beginning to emerge. Lautens has led the way in the use of hydroaluminations as the key step in the total synthesis of complex natural products. The synthesis of the anti-depressant sertraline130 involved the formation of the tetrahydronaphthalene core, and this is best achieved using the nickel-catalyzed hydroalumination of oxabicyclic alkenes (Table 16). 

A variety of intramolecular cathodic homo- and heterocouplings and their stereochemistry also with regard to the synthesis of complex natural products is shown in Fig. 54, and has been compiled in Chap. 11 and in Ref. [280]. 

The term diversity-oriented synthesis (DOS) is relatively new and, as mentioned above, is usually defined as the synthesis of complex, natural product-like molecules using a combinatorial approach and employing the full palette of modern organic reactions. It may be a subject of discussion what exactly qualifies a molecule as being natural product-like [4], and in most cases the similarity to an actual natural product seems reciprocal to the number of synthesized compounds. However, even in less complex cases, the products may be highly substituted polycyclic structures with defined stereochemistry, reminiscent of natural products [19, 20]. In these cases, a moderately complex backbone structure is subsequently modified with a well-established set of selective reactions to introduce diversity. 

Since the discovery and development of highly efficient Rh catalysts with chiral diphosphites and phosphine-phosphites in the 1990s, the enantioselectivity of asymmetric hydroformylation has reached the equivalent level to that of asymmetric hydrogenation for several substrates. Nevertheless, there still exist substrates that require even further development of more efficient chiral ligands, catalyst systems, and reaction conditions. Diastereoselective hydroformylation is expected to find many applications in the total synthesis of complex natural products as well as the syntheses of biologically active compounds of medicinal and agrochemical interests in the near future. Advances in asymmetric hydrocarboxylation has been much slower than that of asymmetric hydroformylation in spite of its high potential in the syntheses of fine chemicals. 

Approaches to the total synthesis of complex natural products using RCM have been investigated. Martin et al. succeeded in the construction of the core 13-membered ring from 37 and 8-membered ring from diene 39 using RCM in manzamine synthesis, and they then achieved the total synthesis of manzamine... 

Recently, the first examples of catalytic enantioselective preparations of chiral a-substituted allylic boronates have appeared. Cyclic dihydropyranylboronate 76 (Fig. 6) is prepared in very high enantiomeric purity by an inverse electron-demand hetero-Diels-Alder reaction between 3-boronoacrolein pinacolate (87) and ethyl vinyl ether catalyzed by chiral Cr(lll) complex 88 (Eq. 64). The resulting boronate 76 adds stereoselectively to aldehydes to give 2-hydroxyalkyl dihydropyran products 90 in a one-pot process.The diastereoselectiv-ity of the addition is explained by invoking transition structure 89. Key to this process is the fact that the possible self-allylboration between 76 and 87 does not take place at room temperature. Several applications of this three-component reaction to the synthesis of complex natural products have been described (see section on Applications to the Synthesis of Natural Products ). 

In a similar approach, Garner et al. (78) made use of silicon-based tethers between ylide and dipolarophile during their program of research into the application of azomethine ylides in the total asymmetric synthesis of complex natural products. In order to form advanced synthetic intermediates of type 248 during the asymmetric synthesis of bioxalomycins (249), an intramolecular azomethine ylide reaction from aziridine ylide precursors was deemed the best strategy (Scheme 3.84). Under photochemically induced ylide formation and subsequent cycloaddition, the desired endo-re products 250 were formed exclusively. However, due to unacceptably low synthetic yields, this approach was abandoned in favor of a longer tether (Scheme 3.85). 

Carbonyl ylides can be viewed as an adduct between a carbonyl group and a carbene and, in fact, some ylides have been prepared this way (see above). The application of carbonyl ylides to the synthesis of complex natural products has been greatly advanced by the finding that stabilized carbenoids can be generated by the decomposition of ot-diazocarbonyl compounds with copper and rhodium complexes. The metallocarbenoids formed by this method are highly electrophilic on carbon and readily add nucleophiles such as the oxygen of many carbonyl derivatives to form carbonyl ylides. This type of reaction is in fact quite old with the first report being the addition of diazomalonate and benzaldehyde (33,34). 

Scott, A.I. (1992) Genetically engineered synthesis of complex natural products. Tetrahedron, 48,2559-78. 

This strategy has been successfully employed for the construction of [5,5,5,5]-fenestranes (Equation (36)), as well as for the synthesis of complex natural products such as terpenoids, for example, hirsutene (Equation (37)). ... 

Compounds in which two donor atoms are linked by a three-carbon chain undergo C-C bond cleavage readily. Well-known reactions are the retro-aldolization, retro Claisen, retro-Michael, and retro-Mannich reactions. Significant application of such processes to synthesis of complex natural products include approaches to caryophyllene [80], nootkatone [81], trihydroxydecipiadiene [82], hybridalactone [83], and mesembrine [84],... 

These adducts easily undergo cycloreversion reactive unstable thioaldehydes can thus be conveniently stored and recovered, and their chemistry has been greatly developed over the last 10 years, mainly by Vedejs and Kirby [126, 253]. Vedejs elegantly used the thiopyranic heterocycles, via a [2,3] sigmatropic shift of a sulfur ylide [508], as precursors for medium sulfide rings, applied to the synthesis of complex natural products in the cytochalasin-zygosporin family [522, 523] for instance. 

A very active area of organic chemistry is the synthesis of complex natural products. In these syntheses, numerous reactions, of which those in Schemes 7 and 8 are examples, are often employed serially to convert a starling compound into a final product that occurs in nature. 

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