A user-friendly approach is presented to sidestep the venerable Grignard addition to unactivated ketones to access tertiary alcohols by reversing the polarity of the disconnection. In this work a ketone instead acts as a nucleophile when adding to simple unactivated olefins to accomplish the same overall transformation. The scope of this coupling is broad as enabled using an electrochemical approach, and the reaction is scalable, chemoselective, and requires no precaution to exclude air or water. Multiple applications demonstrate the simplifying nature of the reaction on multistep synthesis, and mechanistic studies point to an intuitive mechanism reminiscent of other chemical reductants such as SmI 2 (which cannot accomplish the same reaction).
A rare element of high strain in molecules of natural origin is a 1,2-trans fusion of 5-membered rings within a [3.3.0]-bicycle, a motif present in (-)-presilphiperfolan-8-ol. This molecule also possesses a 1,3-trans stereochemical arrangement of substituents on one of its 5-membered rings, a pattern shared by a number of other terpenes. Herein, we disclose the first total synthesis of this highly strained target in 13 steps. The key operation is a Pd-catalyzed tandem cyclization that directly establishes the requisite 1,3-trans stereochemical arrangement on one ring while concurrently setting the stage for the controlled generation of the highly strained 1,2-trans ring fusion of the final architecture.
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