The collective synthesis
of pentacyclic stemoamide-type alkaloids
is recognized as a daunting task despite high demand for a comprehensive
biological profiling of these natural products. In this Letter, we
report a unified synthesis of seven pentacyclic alkaloids and two
unnatural derivatives. The keys to success are (1) the chemoselective
assembly of four five-membered building blocks, (2) the direct oxidation
of pyrrolidine natural products to pyrrole derivatives, and (3) the
stereodivergent construction of totally E- or Z-substituted butenolides.
A five-step total synthesis of (±)-aspidospermidine (1) based on a lactam strategy is reported. Our synthesis features an iridium-catalyzed reductive Michael addition/[3+2] cycloaddition cascade to give a tricyclic ketone intermediate from a simple lactam via an azomethine ylide. The developed strategy enables easily available lactams to be used as stable surrogates of multisubstituted amines and would be applicable to a unified total synthesis of complex Aspidosperma alkaloids.
Our research group has been exploring a lactam strategy for the concise total synthesis of complex alkaloids. In this article, we report full details of the unified total synthesis of stemoamide-type alkaloids by chemoselective assembly of five-membered rings based on the lactam strategy. First, the concise and gram-scale synthesis of tricyclic stemoamide was achieved by vinylogous Michael addition-reduction sequence of an unsaturated γ-lactam with an unsaturated γ-lactone, followed by N-alkylation to form the seven-membered ring. From stemoamide as a common intermediate, chemoselective nucleophilic addition of unsaturated lactone derivatives provides tetracyclic natural products. While stemonine is obtained by an Ir-catalyzed lactam-selective reductive Mannich reaction, saxorumamide and isosaxorumamide are produced through the lactone-selective nucleophilic addition of the lithiated 2-silyl furan. The developed conditions for the lactam-selective nucleophilic reactions are highly general, and were found to be applicable to the total synthesis of pentacyclic stemocochinin and isostemocochinin. The strategy enables the concise and unified total synthesis of tricyclic, tetracyclic and pentacyclic stemoamide-type alkaloids within 12 steps from a commercially available compound.
The totally substituted butenolide including two tetrasubstituted olefins is a distinct structural motif seen in Stemona alkaloids, but efficient methods for its synthesis are not well developed. As an ongoing program aimed at the collective total synthesis of the stemoamide group, we report a stereodivergent method to give either (E)- or (Z)-totally substituted butenolide from the same intermediate. While the AgOTf-mediated elimination via the E1-type mechanism results in the formation of the kinetic (Z)-tetrasubstituted olefin, the subsequent TfOH-mediated isomerization gives the thermodynamic (E)-tetrasubstituted olefin. The pyrrole ring is another important structure found in Stemona alkaloids. The direct oxidation of pyrrolidine rings with MnO2 and careful purification give the pyrrole groups without isomerization of the stereocenter in the lactone group. These two methods enable us to synthesize a series of stemoamide-type alkaloids including tricyclic, tetracyclic and pentacyclic frameworks. The anti-inflammatory activities by inhibition of iNOS expression in macrophage cell line RAW264.7 indicate that the most potent anti-inflammatory compounds without cytotoxicity are protostemonines, which consist of pentacyclic frameworks including the totally substituted butenolide.
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