Sugars
are abundant in waste biomass, making them sustainable chiral
building blocks for organic synthesis. The demand for chiral saturated
heterocyclic rings for pharmaceutical applications is increasing as
they provide well-defined three-dimensional frameworks that show increased
metabolic resistance. A range of sugar thioacetals can be dehydrated
selectively at C-2 under mild basic conditions, and the resulting
ketene thioacetals can be applied to the production of useful chiral
building blocks via further selective dehydration reactions.