Oxazoles to pyridines

Pierre Yves-Renard and co-workers from CNRS have reported in Organic Letters on an interesting synthesis of pyridines.

OL paper

Endoperoxide rearrangement

Ihsan Erden and co-workers at SFSU have reported in Tetrahedron on an endoperoxide rearrangement.

Tetrahedron 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

Garuganin and garugamblin syntheses

Chris Beaudry and co-workers at Oregon State have reported in JOC on some syntheses of diaryl heptanoids.

JOC paper

Iron catalyzed [2+2]

Paul Chirik and co-workers from Princeton have reported in JACS on a mechanistic study of an iron catalyzed [2+2].

JACS paper

ATR-FTIR-UV/Vis monitoring of a reaction

Ursula Bentrup and co-workers at Universitat Rostock in Germany have reported in Tetrahedron on an interesting setup to monitor a reaction.

Tetrahedron paper

Alkynoates and allylic ethers

Young Ho Rhee and co-workers from Pohang University of Science and Technology have reported in Org Lett on a gold catalyzed coupling of an alkynoate and allylic ether.

OL paper

Oxazole cascade transformation

Stephen Habay and co-workers from Salisbury University in Maryland have published in JOC on a transformation of oxazoles to octahydroindoles.

JOC paper

C-C bond breaking mechanism

Here’s an interesting paper where the authors used 18O2 to label one of the oxygens found in the product to investigate the mechanism. Now I’m going to be a little bit critical here but in the supporting information they put the 18O-label on the carbonyl oxygen but in the manuscript they don’t know if it is on the O-benzyl of the ester or the carbonyl oxygen. Moreover the abstract figure shows that the 18O is on the carbonyl oxygen but they really don’t know. It’s a bit deceiving in the paper because it kind of sounds like they determined it through GC-MS but in the supporting information I could not find the GC-MS trace. I guess there is a limitation in analytical technology to determine the position of the 18O. But still it is not clear from the paper that they don’t know which position the 18-oxygen is.

ACIE 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