Due to the profound extent to which natural products inspire medicinal chemists in drug discovery, there is demand for innovative syntheses of these often complex materials. This article describes the synthesis of tricarbocyclic natural product architectures through an extension of the enantioselective Birch-Cope sequence with intramolecular Friedel-Crafts alkylation reactions. Additionally, pa...

The 3,3'-di-O-methyl derivative (15) of the bis-C-aryl glycoside natural product ardimerin (1) has been synthesized in 11 steps from 2,3,4,6-tetrabenzylglucose (2) and 1,2,3-trimethoxybenzene (3). Key steps in the synthesis involve a Lewis acid mediated Friedel-Crafts type glycosylation and a Yamaguchi lactonization under Yonemitsu conditions. 3,3'-Di-O-methyl ardimerin aggregates in aqueous so...

An anodic cyclization-Friedel Crafts alkylation strategy has been used to rapidly assemble the core ring system of alliacol A and to complete a formal total synthesis of the natural product. The anodic cyclization reaction was used to effect the coupling of a nucleophilic furan ring to the normally nucleophilic carbon of a silyl enol ether. The substrate for this initial cyclization reaction co...

A domino Friedel-Crafts/nitro-Michael reaction between 4-substituted indoles and nitroethene is presented. The reaction is catalyzed by BINOL-derived phosphoric acid catalysts, and delivers the corresponding 3,4-ring-fused indoles with very good results in terms of yields and diastereo- and enantioselectivities. The tricyclic benzo[cd]indole products bear a nitro group at the right position to ...

A simple, highly diastereoselective, Lewis acid catalyzed Friedel-Crafts coupling of a cyclic allylic alcohol with resorcinol derivatives has been developed. The method was applied for the enantiospecific total syntheses of structurally diverse natural products such as machaeriol-D, Δ(8)-THC, Δ(9)-THC, epi-perrottetinene and their analogues. Synthesis of both natural products and their enantiom...