Stereocontrolled 1,3-nitrogen migration to access chiral α-amino acids
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ABSTRACT: α-Amino acids are essential for life as building blocks of proteins and components of diverse natural molecules. In both industry and academia, the incorporation of unnatural amino acids is often desirable for modulating chemical, physical, and pharmaceutical properties. We here report a protocol for the economical and practical synthesis of optically active α-amino acids based on an unprecedented stereocontrolled 1,3-nitrogen shift. Our method employs abundant and easily accessible carboxylic acids as starting materials, which are first connected to a nitrogenation reagent, followed by a highly regio- and enantioselective ruthenium- or iron-catalyzed C(sp3)−H amination. This straightforward method displays a very broad scope, providing rapid access to optically active α-amino acids with aryl, allyl, propargyl, and alkyl side chains, and also permits stereocontrolled late-stage amination of carboxylic acid-containing drugs and natural products.
Project description:8-Phenylmenthol esters of salicylic acid derivatives undergo efficient Birch reduction and in situ diastereoselective alkylations to afford methoxycyclohexadienes bearing new quaternary stereogenic centers. The use of an ester-based auxiliary is a designed improvement over the use of prolinol-derived amides, which are expensive and often very difficult to cleave.
Project description:A double migratory cascade reaction of α-halogen-substituted propargylic phosphates to produce highly functionalized 1,3-dienes has been developed. This transformation features 1,3-phosphatyloxy group migration followed by 1,3-shifts of bromine and chlorine as well as the unprecedented 1,3-migration of iodine. The reaction is stereodivergent: (Z)-1,3-dienes are formed in the presence of a copper catalyst, whereas gold-catalyzed reactions exhibit inverted stereoselectivity, producing the corresponding E products.
Project description:Stereocontrolled synthesis of some amino acid-based carbocyclic nucleoside analogs containing ring C=C bond has been performed on β- and γ-lactam basis. Key steps were N-arylation of readily available β- or γ-lactam-derived amino ester isomers and amino alcohols with 5-amino-4,6-dichloropyrimidine; ring closure of the formed adduct with HC(OMe)₃ and nucleophilic displacement of chlorine with various N-nucleophiles in the resulting 6-chloropurine moiety.
Project description:Unnatural chiral α-amino acids are widely used in fields of organic chemistry, biochemistry and medicinal chemistry, and their synthesis has attracted extensive attention. Although the asymmetric synthesis provides some efficient protocols, noble and elaborate catalysts, ligands and additives are usually required which leads to high cost. Distinctly, it is attractive to make unnatural chiral α-amino acids from readily available natural α-amino acids through keeping of the existing chiral α-carbon. However, it is a great challenge to construct them under mild conditions. In this paper, 83 unnatural chiral α-amino acids were prepared at room temperature under visible-light assistance. The protocol uses two readily available genetically coded proteinogenic amino acids, L-aspartic acid and glutamic acid derivatives as the chiral sources and radical precursors, olefins, alkynyl and alkenyl sulfones, and 2-isocyanobiphenyl as the radical acceptors, and various unnatural chiral α-amino acids were prepared in good to excellent yields. The simple protocol, mild conditions, fast reactions, and high efficiency make the method an important strategy for synthesis of diverse unnatural chiral α-amino acids.
Project description:β-Hydroxy-α-amino acids figure prominently as chiral building blocks in chemical synthesis and serve as precursors to numerous important medicines. Reported herein is a method for the synthesis of β-hydroxy-α-amino acid derivatives by aldolization of pseudoephenamine glycinamide, which can be prepared from pseudoephenamine in a one-flask protocol. Enolization of (R,R)- or (S,S)-pseudoephenamine glycinamide with lithium hexamethyldisilazide in the presence of LiCl followed by addition of an aldehyde or ketone substrate affords aldol addition products that are stereochemically homologous with L- or D-threonine, respectively. These products, which are typically solids, can be obtained in stereoisomerically pure form in yields of 55-98 %, and are readily transformed into β-hydroxy-α-amino acids by mild hydrolysis or into 2-amino-1,3-diols by reduction with sodium borohydride. This new chemistry greatly facilitates the construction of novel antibiotics of several different classes.
Project description:In the field of chiral recognition, reported chiral discrimination by 1H NMR spectroscopy has mainly focused on various chiral analytes with a single chiral center, regarded as standard chiral substrates to evaluate the chiral discriminating abilities of a chiral auxiliary. Among them, chiral α-hydroxy acids, α-amino acids and their derivatives are chiral organic molecules involved in a wide variety of biological processes, and also play an important role in the area of preparation of pharmaceuticals, as they are part of the synthetic process in the production of chiral drug intermediates and protein-based drugs. In this paper, several α-hydroxy acids and N-Ts-α-amino acids were used to evaluate the chiral discriminating abilities of tetraaza macrocyclic chiral solvating agents (TAMCSAs) 1a-1d by 1H NMR spectroscopy. The results indicate that α-hydroxy acids and N-Ts-α-amino acids were successfully discriminated in the presence of TAMCSAs 1a-1d by 1H NMR spectroscopy in most cases. The enantiomers of the α-hydroxy acids and N-Ts-α-amino acids were assigned based on the change of integration of the 1H NMR signals of the corresponding protons. The enantiomeric excesses (ee) of N-Ts-α-amino acids 11 with different optical compositions were calculated based on the integration of the 1H NMR signals of the CH3 protons (Ts group) of the enantiomers of (R)- and (S)-11 in the presence of TAMCSA 1b. At the same time, the possible chiral discriminating behaviors have been discussed by means of the Job plots of (±)-2 with TAMCSAs 1b and proposed theoretical models of the enantiomers of 2 and 6 with TAMCSA 1a, respectively.
Project description:Amides are among the most fundamental functional groups and essential structural units, widely used in chemistry, biochemistry and material science. Amide synthesis and transformations is a topic of continuous interest in organic chemistry. However, direct catalytic asymmetric activation of amide C-N bonds still remains a long-standing challenge due to high stability of amide linkages. Herein, we describe an organocatalytic asymmetric amide C-N bonds cleavage of N-sulfonyl biaryl lactams under mild conditions, developing a general and practical method for atroposelective construction of axially chiral biaryl amino acids. A structurally diverse set of axially chiral biaryl amino acids are obtained in high yields with excellent enantioselectivities. Moreover, a variety of axially chiral unsymmetrical biaryl organocatalysts are efficiently constructed from the resulting axially chiral biaryl amino acids by our present strategy, and show competitive outcomes in asymmetric reactions.
Project description:We show a convenient decarboxylative aldol process using a scandium catalyst and a PYBOX ligand to generate a series of highly functionalized chiral α-hydroxy esters. The protocol tolerates a broad range of β-keto acids with inactivated aromatic and aliphatic α-keto esters. The possible mechanism is rationalized.
Project description:Chirality is ubiquitous in biology, including in biomineralization, where it is found in many hardened structures of invertebrate marine and terrestrial organisms (for example, spiralling gastropod shells). Here we show that chiral, hierarchically organized architectures for calcium carbonate (vaterite) can be controlled simply by adding chiral acidic amino acids (Asp and Glu). Chiral, vaterite toroidal suprastructure having a 'right-handed' (counterclockwise) spiralling morphology is induced by L-enantiomers of Asp and Glu, whereas 'left-handed' (clockwise) morphology is induced by D-enantiomers, and sequentially switching between amino-acid enantiomers causes a switch in chirality. Nanoparticle tilting after binding of chiral amino acids is proposed as a chiral growth mechanism, where a 'mother' subunit nanoparticle spawns a slightly tilted, consequential 'daughter' nanoparticle, which by amplification over various length scales creates oriented mineral platelets and chiral vaterite suprastructures. These findings suggest a molecular mechanism for how biomineralization-related enantiomers might exert hierarchical control to form extended chiral suprastructures.
Project description:Chemo- and diastereoselective 1,4-conjugate additions of anionic and radical C-nucleophiles to a chiral bicyclic dehydroalanine (Dha) are described. Of particular importance, radical carbon photolysis by a catalytic photoredox process using a simple method with a metal-free photocatalyst provides exceptional yields and selectivities at room temperature. Moreover, these 1,4-conjugate additions offer an excellent starting point for synthesizing enantiomerically pure carbon-β-substituted unnatural α-amino acids (UAAs), which could have a high potential for applications in chemical biology.