Diastereo- and enantiomerically pure allylboronates: their synthesis and scope

Allylboronates are highly attractive reagents for allyl additions. Enantiomerically pure, stable reagents with a stereogenic centre in alpha-position to boron are especially versatile, albeit often difficult to synthesize. Starting from boron-containing allyl alcohols 6 and 7, which are discussed in detail herein, a set of reagents were obtained via [3,3]-sigmatropic rearrangements and consecutive transformations in the side chain. The configurations could be established first by chemical correlation, but also by X-ray crystallography (16, 18, 34, and 39). Allyl additions were performed resulting in the formation of predominantly (Z)-configured homoallylic alcohols (31, 43-45) with high enantiomeric excess. Detailed investigations on the matched-mismatched interaction between the reagents 15/16 (and ent-15/ent-16, respectively) and isopropylidene glyceraldehyde 42d are presented.