Advances in bioconjugation and native protein modification are appearing at a blistering pace, making it increasingly time consuming for practitioners to identify the best chemical method for modifying a specific amino acid residue in a complex setting. The purpose of this perspective is to provide an informative, graphically rich manual highlighting significant advances in the field over the past decade. This guide will help triage candidate methods for peptide alteration and will serve as a starting point for those seeking to solve long-standing challenges.
Alkyl carboxylic acids are ubiquitous in all facets of chemical science, from natural products to polymers and represent an ideal starting material with which to forge new connections. This study demonstrates how the same activating principles used for decades to make simple C–N (amide) bonds from carboxylic acids with loss of water can be employed to make C–C bonds through coupling with dialkylzinc reagents and loss of carbon dioxide. This disconnection strategy benefits from the use of a simple, inexpensive nickel catalyst and exhibits a remarkably broad scope across a range of substrates (>70 examples).
To optimize drug candidates, modern medicinal chemists are increasingly turning to an unconventional structural motif: small, strained ring systems. However, the difficulty of introducing substituents such as bicyclo[1.1.1]pentanes, azetidines, or cyclobutanes often outweighs the challenge of synthesizing the parent scaffold itself. Thus, there is an urgent need for general methods to rapidly and directly append such groups onto core scaffolds. Here we report a general strategy to harness the embedded potential energy of effectively spring-loaded C–C and C–N bonds with the most oft-encountered nucleophiles in pharmaceutical chemistry, amines. Strain release amination can diversify a range of substrates with a multitude of desirable bioisosteres at both the early and late-stages of a synthesis. The technique has also been applied to peptide labeling and bioconjugation.
Olefin chemistry, through pericyclic reactions, polymerizations, oxidations, or reductions, plays an essential role in the foundation of how organic matter is manipulated.1 Despite its importance, olefin synthesis still largely relies upon chemistry invented more than three decades ago, with metathesis2 being the most recent addition. Here we describe a simple method to access olefins with any substitution pattern or geometry from one of the most ubiquitous and variegated building blocks of chemistry: alkyl carboxylic acids. The same activating principles used in amide-bond synthesis can thus be employed, under Ni- or Fe-based catalysis, to extract CO2 from a carboxylic acid and economically replace it with an organozinc-derived olefin on mole scale. Over sixty olefins across a range of substrate classes are prepared, and the ability to simplify retrosynthetic analysis is exemplified with the preparation of sixteen different natural products across a range of ten different families.
We describe an unprecedented reaction between peptide selenoesters and peptide dimers bearing N-terminal selenocystine that proceeds in aqueous buffer to afford native amide bonds without the use of additives. The selenocystine-selenoester ligations are complete in minutes, even at sterically hindered junctions, and can be used in concert with one-pot deselenization chemistry. Various pathways for the transformation are proposed and probed through a combination of experimental and computational studies. Our new reaction manifold is also showcased in the total synthesis of two proteins.
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