[3,3]-Sigmatropic

Laszlo Kurti and co-workers from UT Southwestern have reported in JACS on a [3,3]-sigmatropic rearrangement approach to access BINAM derivatives using a phosphoric acid catalyst.

JACS paper

Asymmetric epoxidation

Benjamin List and co-workers have reported in JACS on their studies of cinchona alkaloid catalyzed asymmetric epoxidation of activated olefins.

JACS paper

Carbon-carbon coupling constants for stereochemical determination

R. Thomas Williamson and co-workers at Merck have reported in Organic Letters on the use of DFT to calculate and assign stereochemistry from the C-C coupling constants in NMR.

OL paper

Metabolomics

At some point I’m going to need to review principal component analysis to truly understand this metabolomics study that identified a small molecule phermone.

ACIE paper

Ajudazol B synthesis

Dirk Menche and co-workers from the Universitat Bonn have reported in Organic Letters on a synthesis and stereochemical assignment from a bioinformatics study.

JACS paper

Rhodium catalyzed reaction

P. Andrew Evans (University of Liverpool) and Mu-Hyun Baik (Indiana University) and co-workers have published in JACS on a mechanistic investigation of a rhodium catalyzed [3+2+1] cyclization. The Los Alamos LACVP basis set was used to represent rhodium.

JACS paper

Structural reassignment of aquatolide using DFT/NMR

Dean Tantillo and co-workers have used Gaussian in conjunction with NMR and crystallography to reassign the structure of aquatolide.

JACS paper

Phomopsichalasin is actually diaporthichalasin

Thomas Hoye and co-workers from the University of Minnesota have reported in the Journal of Natural Products on the structural reassignment of a natural product using DFT to calculate the NMR chemical shifts.

JNP paper

NMR spectra prediction

It’s very surprising how accurate PERCH software can be for predicting chemical shifts in an NMR spectrum.

JNP paper

Cyclobutane via radical cascade

Andreas Gansauer and co-workers at the Universitat Bonn have reported in Chemistry a European Journal on an interesting mechanistic investigation of a cyclobutane forming reaction using a titanium catalyst.

Chemistry – a European Journal paper