Efficient Lewis Acids Catalyzed Aza-Michael Reactions of Enones with Carbamates

The β-amino carbonyl functionality is not only a segment of biologically important natural products but also a versatile intermediate for the synthesis of nitrogen-containing compounds.1 The development of novel synthetic methods leading to β-amino ketone, β-amino acids or their derivatives has attracted much attention in organic synthesis.2 Among the traditional methods for generating β-amino carbonyl compounds, Mannich-type reaction is one of the classical and powerful methods.3 However,…     

Chemomics and drug innovation

Chemomics is an interdisciplinary study using approaches from chemoinformatics,bioinformatics,synthetic chemistry,and other related disciplines.Biological systems make natural products from endogenous small molecules (natural product building blocks) through a sequence of enzyme catalytic reactions.For each reaction,the natural product building blocks may contribute a group of atoms to the target natural product.We describe this group of atoms as a chemoyl.A chemome is the complete set of chemoyls in an organism.Chemomics studies chemomes and the principles of natural product syntheses and evolutions.Driven by survival and reproductive demands,biological systems have developed effective protocols to synthesize natural products in order to respond to environmental changes;this results in biological and chemical diversity.In recent years,it has been realized that one of the bottlenecks in drug discovery is the lack of chemical resources for drug screening.Chemomics may solve this problem by revealing the rules governing the creation of chemical diversity in biological systems,and by developing biomimetic synthesis approaches to make quasi natural product libraries for drug screening.This treatise introduces chemomics and outlines its contents and potential applications in the fields of drug innovation.     

The bloom of natural product chemistry in China

正Natural product chemistry is an important area across chemistry,biology,and pharmaceutical sciences.The discovery of natural products through isolation and structural elucidation expands the chemical space of biologically active molecules in an unparallel fashion;numerous medicinally relevant compounds arise from natural product scaffolds.The chemical synthesis of natural products advances the development of organic chemistry from the theoretical,     

Catalytic enantioselective synthesis of β-amino alcohols by nitrene insertion

Chiral β-amino alcohols are important building blocks for the synthesis of drugs, natural products, chiral auxiliaries, chiral ligands and chiral organocatalysts. The catalytic asymmetric β-amination of alcohols offers a direct strategy to access this class of molecules. Herein, we report a general intramolecular C(sp³)–H nitrene insertion method for the synthesis of chiral oxazolidin-2-ones as precursors of chiral β-amino alcohols. Specifically, the ring-closing C(sp³)–H amination of N-benzoyloxycarbamates with 2 mol% of a chiral ruthenium catalyst provides cyclic carbamates in up to 99% yield and with up to 99% ee.The method is applicable to benzylic, allylic, and propargylic C–H bonds and can even be applied to completely non-activated C(sp³)–H bonds, although with somewhat reduced yields and stereoselectivities. The obtained cyclic carbamates can subsequently be hydrolyzed to obtain chiral β-amino alcohols. The method is very practical as the catalyst can be easily synthesized on a gram scale and can be recycled after the reaction for further use. The synthetic value of the new method is demonstrated with the asymmetric synthesis of a chiral oxazolidin-2-one as intermediate for the synthesis of the natural product aurantioclavine and chiral β-amino alcohols that are intermediates for the synthesis of chiral amino acids, indane-derived chiral Box-ligands, and the natural products dihydrohamacanthin A and dragmacidin A.     

Synthesis of β–Amino Acid Derivatives

In recent years, β-amino acids and their derivatives have attracted considerable attention due to their occurrence in biologically active natural products, such as dolastatins, cyclohexylnorstatine and Taxol. β–Amino acids also find application in the synthesis of β–lactams, piperidines, indolizidines. Moreover, the peptides consisting of β–amino acids, the so-called β–peptides, have been extensively studied recently. Consequently, considerable efforts have been directed to the synthe…     

An Expeditious Synthesis of β-Indolylketones Catalyzed by p-Toluenesulfonic Acid (PTSA) Using Ultrasonic Irradiation

The investigation of the chemistry of indoles has been, and continues to be, one of the most active areas of heterocyclic chemistry.[1] In particular, β-indolylketones have received much attention as important building blocks for the synthesis of many natural products and other biologically active compounds.[2] In continuation of our work in the synthesis of indole derivates,[3] we describe the remarkable catalytic of PTSA as a cheaper catalyst in ultrasound-accelerated Michael reaction of indole with α, β-unsaturated ketones (2), which provide one of the most efficient routes to the synthesis of β-indolyketones. In all cases, the substitution on the indole nucleus occurred exclusively at the 3-position, and N-alkylation products have not been observed. In addition, the structure of 3a was further confirmed by single crystal X-ray crystallography.     

Discovery and Characterization of a Novel Method for Effective Improvement of Cyclodextrin Yield and Product Specificity

Cyclodextrins(CDs) are widely used in food,phamiaceuticals, drug delivery, and chemical industries and in agriculture and environmental engineering. To improve the yield and selectivity of CDs, this work presented a tacile, scalable and efficient enzymatic synthesis of β-CD from starch using β-cyclodextrin glycosyltransferase (CGTase, EC2.4.1.19) from Bacillus cereus. First, we found that the pretreatment of starch dramatically influenced CDs yield that was related to the structure and molecular weight of the substrate starch. Second, alcohol solvents influenced the yield and product selectivity of CDs;tertiary alcohols enhanced CDs yield(from 54.95% to 68.21%) and secondary alcohols increased the product selectivity(β-CD/γ-CD changed from 6.25 to 8.05). Fluorescence quenching analysis showed that the binding constants and entropy of the solvents influenced the yield and product selectivity, respectively. In conclusion, the results demonstrate that this study provides a promising method for the industrial production of β-CD.     

Fuzzy model prediction of Co(Ⅲ)/Al_2O_3 catalytic behavior in Fischer-Tropsch synthesis

The application of Co(Ⅲ)/Al2O3 catalyst in Fischer-Tropsch synthesis(FTS)was studied in a wide range of synthesis gas conversions and compared with Fuzzy Simulation results.Present study applies fuzzy model to predicting the product composition of CH4,CO2 and CO in Fischer-Tropsch process for natural gas synthesis,in which the input vector was 4-dimension including four variables(operating pressure, operating temperature,time and CO/H2 ratio)of 70 different experiments and the output product is a compositio...     

Studies on the Total Synthesis of Hainanolide (VII) - Analysis of the Relative Stereochemistry of key Intermediate 2

The natural product, hainanolide 1, also under the name harringtonolide2 demonstrated antitumor and antiviral activities in preliminary test. Its structure was determined by X-ray diffraction. The total synthesis of 1 was reported recently by Mander3. A different scheme of its synthesis has been studied in our laboratory4. Here the determination of the stereochemical structure of the key intermediate 2 in the synthesis was reported. HMBC and HMQC spectra identified the skeleton and H,…     

An Efficient Synthetic Method of 11,12-DihydroxylEudesmanolide Sesquiterpenoid from a-Santonin

11,12-dioxygenated eudesmanolide sesquiterpenoid is a large kind of naturally occuring sesquiterpenoids isolated from the medicinal plants, such as J. glutinosa1 and Flourensia heterolepsis 2. In constrast to much investigation of their isolation and structure characterization, the less about their synthesis have been reported. One of the reason may be the difficult hydroxylation at C-11. For example, the synthesis of a simple natural product, kudtriol3, required thirteen steps of reactions f…     

Enantioselective Total Synthesis of the （＋） Antipode of Zeylenone

Starting from shikimic acid, the total synthesis of zeylenone was studied. The product was proved to be the ( )antipode of zeylenone through analysis and comparison of their respective spectra (including NMR, MS, IR and CD) and optical data. The absolute configuration of the natural product was thus determined to be (1 S,2S,3R).     

A Facile Method for Asymmetric Synthesis of β-Hydroxy-α-amino Acids

β-Hydroxy-a-amino acids are an important class of amino acids due to their inherent biological investigations[1] and as structural components of more complex biomolecules.[2] β-Hydroxy-a-amino acids have been used as intermediates in the asymmetric synthesis of other compounds.[3] An efficient and convenient concise method for the preparation of optically pure enantiomers of β-hydroxy-α-amino acids would be of general interest.     

Recent advances in enzyme-mediated peptide ligation

Artificial synthesis and site-specific modification of peptides and proteins have evolved into an indispensable tool for protein engineers and chemical biologists. Chemical and enzymatic approaches to peptide ligation are important alternatives of recombinant DNA technology for protein synthesis and modification. In the past decades, several natural peptide ligases have been discovered. Additionally, protein engineering for improving the ligation efficiencies of the natural peptide ligase and reversing the functionality of protease have provided more powerful peptide ligases. Herein, we briefly summarized the advances of enzyme-mediated peptide ligation and their application in protein synthesis and modification.     

Studies on New Additions to 5-Methoxy-2 (5H)-Furanone: 1, 4-Addition of Grignard Reagents, and 1,3-Dipolar Cycloaddition of Silyl Nitronates

Recently, much effort has been made in the development of generally applicable organic synthesis of 5-alkyloxy-2(5H)-furanones due to their essential structure entities in the synthesis of some biologically active natural products and their application as useful intermediates in organic synthesis1. Their reactions such as Michael addition, Diels-Alder reaction and photocatalyzed conjugate addition have been studied extensively2-4.However, Michael addition reaction of Grignard reagents to 5-m…     

Concise,enantioselective total syntheses of both the proposed and revised structures of (-)-versiquinazoline H

The enantioselective total synthesis of the putative structure of versiquinazoline H and three diastereomers has been achieved,which allowed the revision of the stereochemistry of this natural product.This six-step total synthesis relied on the evolution of the strategy that we previously developed,which features a DMDO-triggered tandem reaction.The modification of the lactamization step resulted in a significant improvement of yield that ensured the efficient total synthesis.     

Recent advances of intermolecular Diels–Alder reaction in bio-inspired synthesis of natural products

The Diels–Alder(D–A)reaction is one of the most powerful reactions in organic synthesis.The intermolecular D–A reaction attracts much less attentions than its intramolecular counterpart in natural product synthesis,possibly due to the issues of reactivity and selectivity.In the past decade,the intermolecular D–A reaction has been increasingly utilized in the total synthesis of structurally complex natural products.In this article,we present a few examples for the elegant applications of the intermolecular D–A reaction that are inspired by biosynthetic hypotheses of the target natural products.These examples demonstrate that D–A reaction is not only useful for preparing building blocks but also powerful for coupling structurally complicated and sterically demanding segments in a highly chemo-and stereo-controlled fashion,which may inspire further developments of intermolecular D–A reaction from both strategy and methodology perspectives.     

STUDIES ON THE TOTAL SYNTHESIS OF MAYTANSINOIDS (Ⅳ)——SYNTHESIS OF MAYTANSINE

This paper reports the total synthesis of optically pure maytansinol and maytansine. The physical constants and spectral data including R_f, m.p., specific rotation, HPLC, UV, CD, IR, NMR, and MS, of synthetic maytansinol and maytansine are identical with those of natural products in all respects. The preliminary biological test showed that synthetic maytansine possesses the same inhibitory activity in vitro against carcinoma cells as the natural product.     

Synthesis of Optically Active trans-2-Aminocyclopropanecarboxylic Esters

The research on optical alicyclic β-amino acids has recently attracted increasingly attention due to their significant pharmacological properties endowed by rigid frameworks, stable conformation1. Numerous biologically active peptides, β-lactams and some other natural products2 contain optical alicyclic β-amino acids. Cyclopropyl-modified alanines have been proved to be useful intermediates in medicine synthesis because of their rigid framework and reactive functional groups (amino and carb…     

Bi（OTf）3-catalyzed tandem reaction of naphthols with β,γ-unsaturated α-ketoesters. Efficient synthesis of functionalized 4H-chromenes

An efficient synthesis of functionalized 4H-chromenes by the tandem reaction of β,γ-unsaturated α- ketoesters with 2-naphthols, 1 -naphthols, and 1,3-dihydroxynaphthalenes has been accomplished with high selectivity and excellent yields in the presence of a catalytic amount of bismuth triflate [Bi（OTf）3, 5 mol%] under mild conditions. The functionalized 4H-chromene synthesis and our previous 2H- chromene hemiacetal synthesis could complement each other to enrich reaction diversity.