Enantioselective Construction of Tetrasubstituted Stereogenic Carbons through Brønsted Base Catalyzed Michael Reactions: α′-Hydroxy Enones as Key Enoate Equivalent

Catalytic and asymmetric Michael reactions constitute very powerful tools for the construction of new <i>C–C</i> bonds in synthesis, but most of the reports claiming high selectivity are limited to some specific combinations of nucleophile/electrophile compound types, and only few successful methods deal with the generation of all-carbon quaternary stereocenters. A contribution to solve this gap is presented here based on chiral bifunctional Brønsted base (BB) catalysis and the use of α′-oxy enones as enabling Michael acceptors with ambivalent H-bond acceptor/donor character, a yet unreported design element for bidentate enoate equivalents. It is found that the Michael addition of a range of enolizable carbonyl compounds that have previously demonstrated challenging (i.e., α-substituted 2-oxindoles, cyanoesters, oxazolones, thiazolones, and azlactones) to α′-oxy enones can afford the corresponding tetrasubstituted carbon stereocenters in high diastereo- and enantioselectivity in the presence of standard BB catalysts. Experiments show that the α′-oxy ketone moiety plays a key role in the above realizations, as parallel reactions under identical conditions but using the parent α,β-unsaturated ketones or esters instead proceed sluggish and/or with poor stereoselectivity. A series of trivial chemical manipulations of the ketol moiety in adducts can produce the corresponding carboxy, aldehyde, and ketone compounds under very mild conditions, giving access to a variety of enantioenriched densely functionalized building blocks containing a fully substituted carbon stereocenter. A computational investigation to rationalize the mode of substrate activation and the reaction stereochemistry is also provided, and the proposed models are compared with related systems in the literature