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 …

Qin, Shen and Zhang, ACIEE, 2008, EarlyView. DOI: 10.1002/anie.200800566.
Second showing in as many months for this popular alkaloid, this route from Yong Qin at the “Department of Chemistry of Medicinal Natural Products and, Key Laboratory of Drug Targeting, West China School of Pharmacy” (can’t get the website to work…) shows a few similarities to the recently covered route by Larry Overman, along with some interesting alternatives. Eschewing Overman’s ambitious palladium cascade designs, they went a bit old-school, planning a carbene insertion into an indole. However, …