The design and application of new classes of multistep transition metal catalyzed reaction

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This research will examine the design of alternative methods to use transition metal catalysis in issues of importance to chemical synthesis. These range from pharmaceutically relevant product synthesis, new classes of polymers, environmentally friendly (Green) reactions, and efficient access to chiral compounds. The specific issues that will be examined are: One Step Synthesis: We propose to use metal catalysis to develop simple, "one step" methods to assemble biologically relevant core structures directly from available building blocks. Because of their efficiency, these will be not only be straightfoward to perform, but also minimize waste, and can prove useful for creating new variants of bio-active compounds. These reactions will both be developed, and applied to the construction of important pharmaceutically relevant products. Catalytic Multicomponent Polymerizations: We propose to develop catalytic approaches to assemble complex polymers in a similar fashion to high volume polymers: by in this case assembling several simple monomers together at once via catalysis (a multicomponent polymerization). This can provide a method to access complex polymers in a practical fashion. These studies will be directed towards generating new classes of conjugated polymers, as well as polymer libraries to tune their properties. Modular Approaches to Asymmetric Transition Metal Catalysis: While asymmetric catalysis provides an efficient route to construct chiral building blocks, the identification of the correct chiral ligand for high selectivity is a significant challenge, since each ligand must be synthesized. We propose to design an alternative to synthetic chiral ligands, which instead uses receptor ligands that can simply hydrogen bond with "non-synthetic" and chiral amino acids. These can be easily modified without synthesis, creating a system well suited to tune for high selectivity.