FR900482 and the mitomycins are two intriguing classes of alkaloid natural products that have analogous biological mechanisms and obvious structural similarity. Both classes possess potent anti-cancer activity, a feature that has led to their investigation and implementation for the clinical treatment of human cancer. Given the structural similarity between these natural products, we envisioned a common synthetic strategy by which both classes could be targeted through assembling the mitomycin skeleton prior to further oxidative functionalization. Realization of this strategy with respect to FR900482 was accomplished through the synthesis of 7-epi-FR900482, which displayed equal potency relative to the natural product against two human cancer cell lines. With the challenging goal of a synthesis of either mitomycin or FR900482 in mind, several methodologies where explored. While not all of these methods ultimately proved useful for our synthetic goal, a number of them led to intriguing findings that provide a more complete understanding of several methodologies. In particular, amination via π-allyl palladium complexes for the synthesis of tetrahydroquinolines, 8-membered heterocycle formation via carbonylative lactamization, and amination through late-stage C-H insertion via rhodium catalysis all featured prominently in our synthetic studies.

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The enantioselective synthesis of polypropionates continues to be an attractive realm for the synthetic chemists mostly due to the challenges presented by the number of consecutive stereogenic centers contained within the aliphatic chain. Over the years, our laboratory has developed an epoxide-based three-step reiterative methodology for the construction of these targets, with the ultimate goal that the approach could be extended to the synthesis of polypropionate-containing natural products. The key steps include the diastereoselective epoxidation of allylic and homoallylic alcohols, and the regioselective cleavage of 2-methyl-3,4-epoxy alcohols. The choice of the organometallic reagent, and the cis/trans geometry of the chiral epoxide can be used to control both the relative and absolute configuration of the resulting propionate unit, allowing our approach to be applied in the synthesis of advanced fragments. Additionally, the combination of our first- and second-generation methodologies permits the incorporation of different variations at the methyl moiety.

A concise non-aldol approach for the stereoselective construction of all-anti polypropionate fragments was developed. The iterative epoxide-based methodology consists of the syn-selective epoxidation of cis homoallylic alcohols using the VO(acac) 2 catalyzed conditions followed by epoxide cleavage with a propynyl aluminum reagent as key steps. The methodology was applied to the synthesis of the all-anti C6-C10 fragment of streptovaricin U.