Synthesis of Enantiopure Fluorohydrins Using Alcohol Dehydrogenases at High Substrate Concentrations

Solution-Phase Late-Stage Chemoselective Photocatalytic Removal of Sulfonyl and Phenacyl Groups in Peptides

Herein, BPC catalyzed visible-light-triggered target-specific late-stage solution phase desulfonylation from tryptophan in oligopeptides is portrayed by overcoming the isolation issue up to octamers. This robust and mild method is highly predictable and chemoselective, tolerating myriad of functional groups in aza-heteroaromatics and peptides. Interestingly, reductive desulfonylation is also amenable to biologically significant reactive histidine and tyrosine side chains, signifying the versatility of the strategy. Additional efficacy of BPC is demonstrated by solution phase phenacyl deprotection from C-terminal in peptides. Furthermore, excellent catalyst loading of 0.5 mol% and recyclability demonstrate the practical utility and applicability of this strategy.

Shedding Light on the D1 -Like Receptors: A Fluorescence-Based Toolbox for Visualization of the D1 and D5 Receptors

Dopamine D1 -like receptors are the most abundant type of dopamine receptors in the central nervous system and, even after decades of discovery, still highly interesting for the study of neurological diseases. We herein describe the synthesis of a new set of fluorescent ligands, structurally derived from D1 R antagonist SCH-23390 and labeled with two different fluorescent dyes, as tool compounds for the visualization of D1 -like receptors. Pharmacological characterization in radioligand binding studies identified UR-NR435 (25) as a high-affinity ligand for D1 -like receptors (pKi (D1 R)=8.34, pKi (D5 R)=7.62) with excellent selectivity towards D2 -like receptors. Compound 25 proved to be a neutral antagonist at the D1 R and D5 R in a Gs heterotrimer dissociation assay, an important feature to avoid receptor internalization and degradation when working with whole cells. The neutral antagonist 25 displayed rapid association and complete dissociation to the D1 R in kinetic binding studies using confocal microscopy verifying its applicability for fluorescence microscopy. Moreover, molecular brightness studies determined a single-digit nanomolar binding affinity of the ligand, which was in good agreement with radioligand binding data. For this reason, this fluorescent ligand is a useful tool for a sophisticated characterization of native D1 receptors in a variety of experimental setups.

Synthesis of Difluoromethylated Carbinols via a HFIP-Promoted Hydroxydifluoromethylation of Aniline, Indole, and Pyrrole Derivatives with Difluoroacetaldehyde Ethyl Hemiacetal

A hexafluoroisopropanol (HFIP)-promoted hydroxydifluoromethylation of aniline, indole, and pyrrole derivatives with difluoroacetaldehyde ethyl hemiacetal has been developed. This protocol provides a facile and straightforward approach to access diverse difluoromethylated carbinols in good to excellent yields under mild conditions. Furthermore, gram-scale and synthetic derivatization experiments have also been demonstrated.

Stairway to Stereoisomers: Engineering Short- and Medium-Chain Ketoreductases To Produce Chiral Alcohols

The short- and medium-chain dehydrogenase/reductase superfamilies are responsible for most chiral alcohol production in laboratories and industries. In nature, they participate in diverse roles such as detoxification, housekeeping, secondary metabolite production, and catalysis of several chemicals with commercial and environmental significance. As a result, they are used in industries to create biopolymers, active pharmaceutical intermediates (APIs), and are also used as components of modular enzymes like polyketide synthases for fabricating bioactive molecules. Consequently, random, semi-rational and rational engineering have helped transform these enzymes into product-oriented efficient catalysts. The rise of newer synthetic chemicals and their enantiopure counterparts has proved challenging, and engineering them has been the subject of numerous studies. However, they are frequently limited to the synthesis of a single chiral alcohol. The study attempts to defragment and describe hotspots of engineering short- and medium-chain dehydrogenases/reductases for the production of chiral synthons.

Alcohol Dehydrogenases with anti-Prelog Stereopreference in Synthesis of Enantiopure Alcohols

Biocatalytic production of both enantiomers of optically active alcohols with high enantiopurities is of great interest in industry. Alcohol dehydrogenases (ADHs) represent an important class of enzymes that could be used as catalysts to produce optically active alcohols from their corresponding prochiral ketones. This review covers examples of the synthesis of optically active alcohols using ADHs that exhibit anti‐Prelog stereopreference. Both wild‐type and engineered ADHs that exhibit anti‐Prelog stereopreference are highlighted.

Transaminases as suitable catalysts for the synthesis of enantiopure β,β-difluoroamines

Transaminases have shown the ability to catalyze the amination of a series of aliphatic and (hetero)aromatic α,α-difluorinated ketones with high stereoselectivity, thus providing the corresponding β,β-difluoroamines in high isolated yields (55-82%) and excellent enantiomeric excess (>99%). It was also observed that these activated substrates could be quantitatively transformed by employing a small molar excess of the amine donor since this amination process was thermodynamically favored. Selected transformations could be scaled up to 500 mg, showing the robustness of this methodology.

Imidazolylacetophenone oxime-based multifunctional neuroprotective agents: Discovery and structure-activity relationships

Alzheimer's disease (AD) possesses a complex pathogenetic mechanism. Nowadays, multitarget agents are considered to have potential in effectively treating AD via triggering molecules in functionally complementary pathways at the same time. Here, based on the screening (∼1400 compounds) against neuroinflammation, an imidazolylacetophenone oxime ether (IOE) was discovered as a novel hit. In order to obtain SARs, a series of imidazolylacetophenone oxime derivatives were constructed, and their C=N bonds were confirmed as the Z configuration by single crystals. These derivatives exhibited potential multifunctional neuroprotective effects including anti-neuroinflammatory, antioxidative damage, metal-chelating, inhibition of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) properties. Among these derivatives, compound 12i displayed the most potent inhibitory activity against nitric oxide (NO) production with EC₅₀ value of 0.57 μM 12i can dose-dependently suppress the expression of iNOS and COX-2 but not change the expression of HO-1 protein. Moreover, 12i exhibited evidently neuroprotective effects on H₂O₂-induced PC12 cells damage and ferroptosis without cytotoxicity at 10 μM, as well as selectively metal chelating properties via chelating Cu²⁺. In addition, 12i showed a mixed-type inhibitory effect on AChE in vitro. The structure-activity relationships (SARs) analysis indicated that dioxolane groups on benzene ring and rigid oxime ester can improve the activity. Parallel artificial membrane permeation assay (PAMPA) also verified that 12i can overcome the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Overall, this is the first report on imidazolylacetophenone oxime-based multifunctional neuroprotective effects, suggesting that this type of compounds might be novel multifunctional agents against AD.

Highly Regio- and Enantioselective Hydrosilylation of gem-Difluoroalkenes via Nickel Catalysis

The synthesis of small organic molecules with a difluoromethylated stereocenter is particularly attractive in drug discovery. Herein, we developed an efficient method for the direct generation of difluoromethylated stereocenters through Ni(0)-catalyzed regio - and enantioselective hydrosilylation of gem -difluoroalkenes. The reaction also represents the enantioselective construction of carbon(sp 3 )-silicon bonds with nickel catalysis, which provides an atom- and step-economical synthesis route of high-value optically active α-difluoromethylsilanes. This protocol features with readily available starting materials and commercial chiral catalysis, broad substrates spanning a range of functional groups with high yield (up to 99% yield) and excellent enantioselectivity (up to 96% ee). The enantioenriched products undergo a variety of stereospecific transformations. Preliminary mechanistic studies were performed.

Chemoenzymatic Asymmetric Synthesis of Pyridine-Based α-Fluorinated Secondary Alcohols

Fluoro‐substituted and heteroaromatic compounds are valuable intermediates for a variety of applications in pharma‐ and agrochemistry and synthetic chemistry. This study investigates the chemoenzymatic preparation of chiral alcohols bearing a heteroaromatic ring with an increasing degree of fluorination in α‐position. Starting from readily available picoline derivatives prochiral α‐halogenated acyl moieties were introduced with excellent selectivity and 64–95 % yield. The formed carbonyl group was subsequently reduced to the corresponding alcohols using the alcohol dehydrogenase from Lactobacillus kefir, yielding an enantiomeric excess of 95–>99 % and up to 98 % yield.

Predicting enzymatic reactions with a molecular transformer

The use of enzymes for organic synthesis allows for simplified, more economical and selective synthetic routes not accessible to conventional reagents. However, predicting whether a particular molecule might undergo a specific enzyme transformation is very difficult. Here we used multi-task transfer learning to train the molecular transformer, a sequence-to-sequence machine learning model, with one million reactions from the US Patent Office (USPTO) database combined with 32 181 enzymatic transformations annotated with a text description of the enzyme. The resulting enzymatic transformer model predicts the structure and stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reaction products with remarkable accuracy. One of the key novelties is that we combined the reaction SMILES language of only 405 atomic tokens with thousands of human language tokens describing the enzymes, such that our enzymatic transformer not only learned to interpret SMILES, but also the natural language as used by human experts to describe enzymes and their mutations.

Catalytic Asymmetric Construction of Tertiary Carbon Centers Featuring an α-Difluoromethyl Group with CF2H-CH2-NH2 as the "Building Block"

We report here for the first time a novel difluoromethylated ketimine building block condensed by thioisatin and difluoroethylamine, offering efficient access to a broad range of enantioenriched products bearing difluoroethylamine units (27 examples, ≤98% yield, >99% ee) in the presence of quinine-derived squaramide. Further transformation of the intermediate would generate a variety of versatile functional blocks like α-difluoromethyl amines, β-amino acid, and β-diamine with retention of the enantiomeric excess at the difluoromethyl-bound carbon.

Stereoselective synthetic strategies of stereogenic carbon centers featuring a difluoromethyl group

The scope of this review is to summarize routine asymmetric synthetic methods which enable the effective and selective introduction of difluoromethyl groups into the desired compounds, providing a general introduction to this important research area.

Double Enzyme-Catalyzed One-Pot Synthesis of Enantiocomplementary Vicinal Fluoro Alcohols

A double-enzyme-catalyzed strategy for the synthesis of enantiocomplementary vicinal fluoro alcohols through a one-pot, three-step process including lipase-catalyzed hydrolysis, spontaneous decarboxylative fluorination, and subsequent ketoreductase-catalyzed reduction was developed. With this approach, β-ketonic esters were converted to the corresponding vicinal fluoro alcohols with high isolated yields (up to 92%) and stereoselectivities (up to 99%). This new cascade process addresses some issues in comparison with traditional methods such as environmentally hazardous reaction conditions and low stereoselectivity outcome.

Thiocyanation of α-amino carbonyl compounds for the synthesis of aromatic thiocyanates

A procedure for K2S2O8-mediated thiocyanation of α-amino carbonyl compounds has been developed for the synthesis of aromatic thiocyanates. A series of α-amino carbonyl compounds have been investigated, and the desired products are obtained in 74%–93% yields. This strategy has the advantages of simple reaction conditions without use of a transition-metal catalyst, high regioselectivity, and high efficiency. Moreover, we found that arylamine thiocyanates can also be obtained from α-amino carbonyl compounds and potassium thiocyanate in the presence of CoCl2·6H2O, I2, and dimethyl sulfoxide through the cleavage of the C–N bond. To explore the reaction mechanism, we designed several control experiments and proposed a possible mechanism using the experimental results and related literature reports.

Metal-Free C-N or C-C Bond Cleavages of α-Azido Ketones: An Oxidative-Amidation Strategy for the Synthesis of α-Ketothioamides and Amides

A novel metal-free oxidative-amidation strategy for the synthesis of α-ketothioamides and amides from α-azido ketones was developed. The C-H bond thionation of α-azido ketones with elemental sulfur could form α-ketothioacyl azide, which was then nucleophilically attacked by amines, causing the cleavage of the C-N bond to afford α-ketothioamides, while amides could be formed with the release of nitrogen gas and cyano anion in the presence of PhI(OAc)₂ by selective C-C bond cleavage.

Rhodococcus as A Versatile Biocatalyst in Organic Synthesis

The application of purified enzymes as well as whole-cell biocatalysts in synthetic organic chemistry is becoming more and more popular, and both academia and industry are keen on finding and developing novel enzymes capable of performing otherwise impossible or challenging reactions. The diverse genus Rhodococcus offers a multitude of promising enzymes, which therefore makes it one of the key bacterial hosts in many areas of research. This review focused on the broad utilization potential of the genus Rhodococcus in organic chemistry, thereby particularly highlighting the specific enzyme classes exploited and the reactions they catalyze. Additionally, close attention was paid to the substrate scope that each enzyme class covers. Overall, a comprehensive overview of the applicability of the genus Rhodococcus is provided, which puts this versatile microorganism in the spotlight of further research.

Catalytic Asymmetric Synthesis of α,α-Difluoromethylated and α-Fluoromethylated Tertiary Alcohols

The catalytic asymmetric synthesis of α,α-difluoromethylated tertiary alcohols is described, using an asymmetric dihydroxylation reaction. This protocol using either the AD-mix-α or AD-mix-β allowed an easy access to these valuable fluorinated chiral building blocks, which have been obtained with excellent yields and er. In addition, the reaction was extended to the α-fluoromethylated analogues.

Synthesis of α-Fluorinated Imides via Direct Fluorohydroxylation of Ynamides

A practical synthesis of α-fluorinated imides via the catalyst-free fluorohydroxylation of ynamides is developed. The reaction employs commercially available Selectfluor (F-TEDA-BF₄) and H₂O as the fluorine and hydroxyl sources, respectively. A broad range of aryl- or alkyl-substituted ynamides were well applicable to the reaction with good functional group tolerance under simple and mild reaction conditions. The synthetic utility of the α-fluoroimide products was demonstrated by several value-added transformations. Preliminary mechanistic studies were conducted.

Access towards enantiopure α,α-difluoromethyl alcohols by means of sulfoxides as traceless chiral auxiliaries

A new methodology to access enantiopure α,α-difluoromethyl alcohols is hereby being described. The strategy relies on the use of an enantiopure aryl α,α-difluoromethyl sulfoxide employed as chiral and removable auxiliary for the stereoselective difluoromethylation of carbonyl derivatives. The obtained α,α-difluoro-β-hydroxysulfoxides displayed unprecedented diastereomeric ratios.

Metal-Free and User-Friendly Regioselective Hydroxyfluorination of Olefins

A simple, user-friendly, metal-free protocol for the regioselective anti-Markovnikov hydrofluorination of olefins using readily available and inexpensive reagents has been developed. This new approach displays a broader scope than previously reported methodologies and has been applied to the late-stage fluorination of a complex molecule, giving rise to a fluorosteroid derivative. The stereochemistry of the process has also been studied in some detail.

Synthesis of N-Substituted Iminosugar Derivatives and Evaluation of Their Immunosuppressive Activities

It is important to find more effective and safer immunosuppressants, because clinically used immunosuppressive agents have significant side effects. A series of N-substituted iminosugar derivatives were designed and synthesized, and their immunosuppressive effects were evaluated by the CCK-8 assay. The results revealed that iminosugars 10 e and 10 i, that is, (3R,4S)-1-(4-heptyloxylphenylethyl)pyrrolidine-3,4-diol and (3R,4S)-1-[2-(2-chloro-4-(p-tolylthio)-phenyl-1-yl)ethyl]pyrrolidine-3,4-diol, respectively, exhibited the strongest inhibitory effects on mouse splenocyte proliferation (IC₅₀ =2.16 and 2.48 μm, respectively), whereas the iminosugars containing an amide group near the hydrophilic head (compounds 10 j-n) exhibited no inhibitory effects. Further studies revealed that the inhibitory effects on splenocyte proliferation may have come from the suppression of both IFN-γ and IL-4 cytokines. Our results suggest that synthetic iminosugars, especially compounds 10 e and 10 i, hold potential as immunosuppressive agents.

Catalyst free synthesis of α-fluoro-β-hydroxy ketones/α-fluoro-ynols via electrophilic fluorination of tertiary propargyl alcohols using Selectfluor™ (F-TEDA-BF4)

A facile access to α-fluoro-β-hydroxyketones via electrophilic fluorination.

Asymmetric Ketone Reduction by Imine Reductases

The rapidly growing area of asymmetric imine reduction by imine reductases (IREDs) has provided alternative routes to chiral amines. Here we report the expansion of the reaction scope of IREDs by showing the stereoselective reduction of 2,2,2-trifluoroacetophenone. Assisted by an in silico analysis of energy barriers, we evaluated asymmetric hydrogenations of carbonyls and imines while considering the influence of substrate reactivity on the chemoselectivity of this novel class of reductases. We report the asymmetric reduction of C=N as well as C=O bonds catalysed by members of the IRED enzyme family.

Synthesis of α-Fluoroketones from Vinyl Azides and Mechanism Interrogation

An efficient and mild fluorination of vinyl azides for the synthesis of α-fluoroketones is described. The mechanistic studies indicated that a single-electron transfer (SET) and a subsequent fluorine atom transfer process could be involved in the reaction.

Catalytic Promiscuity of Transaminases: Preparation of Enantioenriched β-Fluoroamines by Formal Tandem Hydrodefluorination/Deamination

Transaminases are valuable enzymes for industrial biocatalysis and enable the preparation of optically pure amines. For these transformations they require either an amine donor (amination of ketones) or an amine acceptor (deamination of racemic amines). Herein transaminases are shown to react with aromatic β-fluoroamines, thus leading to simultaneous enantioselective dehalogenation and deamination to form the corresponding acetophenone derivatives in the absence of an amine acceptor. A series of racemic β-fluoroamines was resolved in a kinetic resolution by tandem hydrodefluorination/deamination, thus giving the corresponding amines with up to greater than 99 % ee. This protocol is the first example of exploiting the catalytic promiscuity of transaminases as a tool for novel transformations.