Catalytic 2-Ethylhexanoic Acid Promotes Mild Miyaura Borylations

The Miyaura borylation of aryl and heteroaryl chlorides and bromides using a combination of potassium carbonate and 5 mol % 2-ethylhexanoic acid at 25 °C is reported. The in situ generation of a catalytic amount of potassium 2-ethylhexanoate under these conditions avoids the need for special handling of stoichiometric quantities of hygroscopic potassium 2-ethylhexanoate during the reaction setup as well as difficulties in removing the resulting carboxylic acid during product isolation.

Peridinin Is an Exceptionally Potent and Membrane-Embedded Inhibitor of Bilayer Lipid Peroxidation

Antilipoperoxidant protein dysfunction is associated with many human diseases, suggesting that bilayer lipid peroxidation may contribute broadly to pathogenesis. Small molecule inhibitors of this membrane-localized chemistry could in theory enable better understanding and/or treatment of such diseases, but currently available compounds have important limitations. Many biological questions thus remain unanswered, and clinical trials have largely been disappointing. Enabled by efficient, building block-based syntheses of three atypical carotenoid natural products produced by microorganisms that thrive in environments of extreme oxidative stress, we found that peridinin is a potent inhibitor of nonenzymatic bilayer lipid peroxidation in liposomes and in primary human endothelial cells. We also found that peridinin blocks monocyte-endothelial cell adhesion, a key step in atherogenesis. A series of frontier solid-state NMR experiments with a site-specifically 13C-labeled isotopolog synthesized using the same MIDA boronate building block-based total synthesis approach revealed that peridinin is completely embedded within and physically spans the hydrophobic core of POPC membranes, maximizing its effective molarity at the site of the targeted lipid peroxidation reactions. Alternatively, the widely used carotenoid astaxanthin is significantly less potent and was found to primarily localize extramembranously. Peridinin thus represents a promising and biophysically well-characterized starting point for the development of small molecule antilipoperoxidants that serve as more effective biological probes and/or therapeutics.

Enantioselective, Catalytic Fluorolactonization Reactions with a Nucleophilic Fluoride Source

The enantioselective synthesis of 4-fluoroisochromanones via chiral aryl iodide-catalyzed fluorolactonization is reported. This methodology uses HF-pyridine as a nucleophilic fluoride source with a peracid stoichiometric oxidant and provides access to lactones containing fluorine-bearing stereogenic centers in high enantio- and diastereoselectivity. The regioselectivity observed in these lactonization reactions is complementary to that obtained with established asymmetric electrophilic fluorination protocols.

Synthesis of most polyene natural product motifs using just 12 building blocks and one coupling reaction

The inherent modularity of polypeptides, oligonucleotides and oligosaccharides has been harnessed to achieve generalized synthesis platforms. Importantly, like these other targets, most small-molecule natural products are biosynthesized via iterative coupling of bifunctional building blocks. This suggests that many small molecules also possess inherent modularity commensurate with systematic building block-based construction. Supporting this hypothesis, here we report that the polyene motifs found in >75% of all known polyene natural products can be synthesized using just 12 building blocks and one coupling reaction. Using the same general retrosynthetic algorithm and reaction conditions, this platform enabled both the synthesis of a wide range of polyene frameworks that covered all of this natural-product chemical space and the first total syntheses of the polyene natural products asnipyrone B, physarigin A and neurosporaxanthin b-D-glucopyranoside. Collectively, these results suggest the potential for a more generalized approach to making small molecules in the laboratory.

Stereoretentive Suzuki-Miyaura coupling of haloallenes enables fully stereocontrolled access to (-)-peridinin

Stimulated by the substantial challenge of synthesizing the complex and sensitive stereogenic allene-containing core of (-)-peridinin, the first stereocontrolled coupling of haloallenes with boronic acids has been achieved. This new method and the principles that emerged during its development stand to enable the more efficient and flexible preparation of a wide range of natural products, pharmaceuticals, and intermediates that possess a stereogenic allene motif. This new reaction was harnessed to achieve the first completely stereocontrolled total synthesis of (-)-peridinin. This synthesis was accomplished using only one reaction iteratively to assemble four fully functionalized building blocks with complete stereoretention at each initial halide or boron-bearing carbon. This synthesis elevates the capacity of the iterative cross-coupling strategy to an unprecedented benchmark. Moreover, the efficient and highly modular nature of this synthesis promises to enable systematic dissection of the heretofore enigmatic structure/function relationships that underlie the protein-like antilipoperoxidant activities of this remarkable small molecule natural product.

Distributed Drug Discovery, Part 3: using D(3) methodology to synthesize analogs of an anti-melanoma compound

For the successful implementation of Distributed Drug Discovery (D(3)) (outlined in the accompanying Perspective), students, in the course of their educational laboratories, must be able to reproducibly make new, high quality, molecules with potential for biological activity. This article reports the successful achievement of this goal. Using previously rehearsed alkylating agents, students in a second semester organic chemistry laboratory performed a solid-phase combinatorial chemistry experiment in which they made 38 new analogs of the most potent member of a class of antimelanoma compounds. All compounds were made in duplicate, purified by silica gel chromatography, and characterized by NMR and LC/MS. As a continuing part of the Distributed Drug Discovery program, a virtual D(3) catalog based on this work was then enumerated and is made freely available to the global scientific community.

Distributed Drug Discovery, Part 2: global rehearsal of alkylating agents for the synthesis of resin-bound unnatural amino acids and virtual D(3) catalog construction

Distributed Drug Discovery (D³) proposes solving large drug discovery problems by breaking them into smaller units for processing at multiple sites. A key component of the synthetic and computational stages of D³ is the global rehearsal of prospective reagents and their subsequent use in the creation of virtual catalogs of molecules accessible by simple, inexpensive combinatorial chemistry. The first section of this article documents the feasibility of the synthetic component of Distributed Drug Discovery. Twenty-four alkylating agents were rehearsed in the United States, Poland, Russia, and Spain, for their utility in the synthesis of resin-bound unnatural amino acids 1, key intermediates in many combinatorial chemistry procedures. This global reagent rehearsal, coupled to virtual library generation, increases the likelihood that any member of that virtual library can be made. It facilitates the realistic integration of worldwide virtual D³ catalog computational analysis with synthesis. The second part of this article describes the creation of the first virtual D³ catalog. It reports the enumeration of 24 416 acylated unnatural amino acids 5, assembled from lists of either rehearsed or well-precedented alkylating and acylating reagents, and describes how the resulting catalog can be freely accessed, searched, and downloaded by the scientific community.