L-Selectride reduction of a chiral or achiral enone followed by reaction of the resulting enolate with optically active α-alkoxy aldehydes proceeded with excellent diastereoselectivity. The resulting α,α-dimethyl-β-hydroxy ketones are inherent to a variety of biologically active natural products.Asymmetric aldol reactions leading to the stereocontrolled generation of β-hydroxy carbonyl derivatives are among the most important reactions in organic synthesis. 1 Consequently, a number of effective methodologies have been developed over the years. In a series of elegant studies, Stork and co-workers have shown that lithium-ammonia reduction of enones leads to stoichiometric generation of enolates. 2 Since then, reductive aldol reactions in which conjugate reduction followed by aldol reaction of the resulting enolates led to the development of a wide variety of methodologies for the synthesis of β-hydroxy carbonyl derivatives. 3 In recent years, impressive progress has been made in both catalytic 4 and enantioselective 5 reductive aldol processes. In the context of our enantioselective synthesis of (+)-peloruside A, we recently carried out a L-selectride mediated reductive aldol coupling of enone 1 and aldehyde 2 to provide aldol product 3 and its diastereomer as a 4:1 mixture in 92% yield at −78 °C for 1 h. 6,7 The major aldolate 3 was subsequently converted to peloruside A. The overall process is quite practical and offers significant improvement over the direct aldol reaction of related ketone enolate and aldehyde reported recently. 8 Of particular importance, these α,α-dimethyl β-hydroxy carbonyl derivatives are structural features of numerous bioactive natural products like epothilones, 9 mycalamide A 10 and peloruside A. 6 Encouraged by the reasonable diastereoselectivity of the L-selectride mediated reductive aldol process, we have now examined the stereochemical outcome with a variety of chiral and achiral enones and aldehydes bearing an α-β-alkoxy stereocenter. Herein, we report the results of our investigations. Excellent levels of diastereoselectivity are attainable when the enolate from L-selectride reduction is reacted with aldehydes containing an α-chiral center.Our preliminary investigations focused on reactions with model 5 and optically active isopropylidene glyceraldehyde 4. As shown in Scheme 1, enone 5 was prepared in a two stepakghosh@purdue.edu . Supporting Information Available: Experimental procedures and 1 H-and 13 C-NMR spectra for all new compounds. This material is available free of charge via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.
NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptOrg Lett. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 September 22. (1) reaction of isopropenyl magnesium bromide in diethyl ether followed by Dess-Martin oxidation 11 of the resulting diastereomeric alcohols to enone 5 in 63% yield in 2-steps. Enone 5 was treated with 1·1 equiv of L-selectride at −78 °C for 10 min to form the corresponding lithium enolate. To the resulting enolate, 2 equiv of isopropylidene-Dglyceraldehyde...