Formal Synthesis of (±)-Allocolchicine Via Gold-Catalysed Direct Arylation: Implication of Aryl Iodine(III) Oxidant in Catalyst Deactivation Pathways.

ABSTRACT: A concise formal synthesis of racemic allocolchicine has been developed, centred on three principal transformations: a retro-Brook alkylation reaction to generate an arylsilane, a gold-catalysed arylative cyclisation to generate the B-ring via biaryl linkage, and a palladium-catalysed carbonylation of an aryl chloride to generate an ester. 1H NMR monitoring of the key gold-catalysed cyclisation step reveals that a powerful catalyst deactivation process progressively attenuates the rate of catalyst turnover. The origins of the catalyst deactivation have been investigated, with an uncatalysed side-reaction, involving the substrate and the iodine(III) oxidant, identified as the source of a potent catalyst poison. The side reaction generates 1-4% of a diaryliodonium salt, and whilst this moiety is shown not to be an innate catalyst deactivator, when it is tethered to the arylsilane reactant, the inhibition becomes powerful. Kinetic modelling of processes run at two different catalyst concentrations allows extraction of the partitioning of the gold catalyst between the substrate and its diaryliodonium salt, with a rate of diaryliodonium salt generation consistent with that independently determined in the absence of catalyst. The high partition ratio between substrate and diaryliodonium salt (5/1) results in very efficient, and ultimately complete, diversion of the catalyst off-cycle.

Au-Catalyzed Biaryl Coupling To Generate 5- to 9-Membered Rings: Turnover-Limiting Reductive Elimination versus π-Complexation.

The intramolecular gold-catalyzed arylation of arenes by aryl-trimethylsilanes has been investigated from both mechanistic and preparative aspects. The reaction generates 5- to 9-membered rings, and of the 44 examples studied, 10 include a heteroatom (N, O). Tethering of the arene to the arylsilane provides not only a tool to probe the impact of the conformational flexibility of Ar-Au-Ar intermediates, via systematic modulation of the length of aryl-aryl linkage, but also the ability to arylate neutral and electron-poor arenes-substrates that do not react at all in the intermolecular process. Rendering the arylation intramolecular also results in phenomenologically simpler reaction kinetics, and overall these features have facilitated a detailed study of linear free energy relationships, kinetic isotope effects, and the first quantitative experimental data on the effects of aryl electron demand and conformational freedom on the rate of reductive elimination from diaryl-gold(III) species. The turnover-limiting step for the formation of a series of fluorene derivatives is sensitive to the reactivity of the arene and changes from reductive elimination to π-complexation for arenes bearing strongly electron-withdrawing substituents (σ > 0.43). Reductive elimination is accelerated by electron-donating substituents (ρ = -2.0) on one or both rings, with the individual σ-values being additive in nature. Longer and more flexible tethers between the two aryl rings result in faster reductive elimination from Ar-Au(X)-Ar and lead to the π-complexation of the arene by Ar-AuX2 becoming the turnover-limiting step.