Njarðarson , McGrath, Bartlett, Sittihan. ACIEE, 2009, EarlyView. DOI: 10.1002/anie.200903347.
It’s back!  Twice in as many weeks, too, as KC has decided to drop the details on his many syntheses of platensimycin and platensin into a full JACS paper.  However, I’ve spent enough time looking at his work in this area, so it’s a pleasure to examine this synthesis by Jon Njarðarson of Cornell.  I should point out that I don’t feel that this is necessarily the best route, but it’s got some damn smart chemistry in it, so what …

Nicolaou, Lim, Becker. ACIEE, 2009, EarlyView. DOI: 10.1002/anie.200900058.
Huh; you wait months for a Nicolaou synthesis, and then two come at once!  This little beastie and sporolide B dropped in Angewandte on consecutive days, both represented by abstracts drawn in the now familiar crayon-o-vision styling of La Jolla’s most-prolific chemist and photoshop abuser. Seriously, check this stuff out – this is on his home page!  The last time I saw anything like this I’d been over-doing both the ether and the geocities…

Of course, all this wouldn’t be …

Lee, Kim, Jang, Choi and Chung. ACIEE, 2008, EarlyView. DOI: 10.1002/anie.200800568.
Antibiotic… blah blah… Merck… Nicolaou… other synthesis covered…
Yep, you all know about platensimycin, and half of you have probably worked on / are working on syntheses of this ‘popular’ target. Eun Lee hasn’t bothered with a full total synthesis, instead satisfying a neat formal of the right-hand ‘cage’ motif. Key to this was the optimisation of a substrate for a rhodium catalysed carbonyl-ylide cycloaddition.
They suggest that they knew that a terminal olefin would have …