Look What I Can Do!

Being able to introduce oxygens to certain positions and take off specific atoms in an already complex looking molecule is just another one of the synthetic chemist’s puzzles.  Kazuo Nagasawa and co-workers at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology have recently published in Tetrahedron on manipulating the structure of vitamin D to make different analogues of the compound.  When I first saw the transformation, I just knew that they had to use OsO4 to selectively place a hydroxy in the C-1 position.

 

Tetrahedron Paper