TRIPLE ALLENE ADDITION IN ONE SHOT

摘要

Multicomponent reactions can furnish highly functionalized single products by joining three or more building blocks all at once, generating diverse molecular complexity with high atom efficiency and low time cost. While such reactions hold promise for express delivery of complicated synthetic targets, many-particularly asymmetric variants-are difficult to control and harness. Kuiling Ding, Zheng Wang, and co-workers now report a highly regio- and enantioselective catalytic preparation under mild conditions for chiral allylic arylamines from four simple components: terminal allenes, methanol, carbon monoxide, and arylamines (DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5b07764). The transformation involves an alkoxycarbonylation-amination cascade catalyzed by a spiroketal-based diphosphine palladium catalyst that bears a close structural resemblance to one used previously by the authors to directly aminate allyI acetates in an asymmetric manner.