Today we (Institute for Bioorganic Chemistry) would like to congratulate our colleague Marvin Mantel and his co-authors Markus Giesler, Marian Guder and Elisabeth Rüthlein for their excellent work and the resulting publication in the journal Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed.
The article describes an organocatalysed, low-solvent, multi-component one-pot process, which allows chemoenzymatic access to a-methylated ketones and diols starting from favourable reactants. These enantiomerically pure key substances are important building blocks in many prominent natural products.
Remarkable is the synthesis of a large library of primary and secondary ether compounds (for the subsequent enzymatic conversion) in only three reaction steps using very small amounts of catalyst. Until then, these compounds were only very poorly accessible or, in some cases, not accessible at all.
The article is available online.