Michael addition to a,b-unsaturated carbonyl compounds is one of the fundamental bond-forming processes and offers an extremely powerful tool for the synthesis of highly functionalized organic molecules.1) Thus, development of efficient chiral catalysts for this reaction is still an exciting topic in synthetic organic chemistry.2,3) Various types of catalysts have been developed so far. Among them, organocatalysts are especially attractive since they do not require strictly controlled reaction conditions, and are not considered to have much unfavorable environment effect compared to the metalcontaining catalysts. 4,5) We have recently developed the novel C 2 -symmetrical chiral cyclic guanidine compounds 1 as new organocatalysts, 6-9) whose structure was inspired by the marine guanidine alkaloid ptilomycalin A 10-12) and its analogs (Fig. 1). 13,14) These catalysts were found to accelerate the heteroMichael reaction depending upon their cavity size. 7) One of the catalyst 1b works as phase-transfer catalyst for the alkylation of Schiff base imine with high enantioselectivity.8) Although 1 possesses wide possibility to be developed as superior organocatalyst, it also have some deficiencies, i.e., requirement for relatively long steps preparation, and no asymmetric induction at the hetero-Michael reaction.7) To overcome these issues, we focused our attention on urea and/or thiourea compounds, which can be grasped as core structure of 1, as prototype of new efficient and practical organocatalysts. Herein we wish to report the preliminary/basic results of a novel urea-type catalyst 10 for the hetero-Michael reaction, including results on an asymmetric version of this conjugate addition reaction.
Results and DiscussionUrea and thiourea groups are known to coordinate to a carbonyl group as guanidine group, and to activate it by lowering the LUMO energy via partial protonation. Thus, various carbonyl group reactions catalyzed by urea or thiourea compounds have been developed. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] At the outset of our studies for developing new chiral urea and/or thiourea catalyst of the hetero-Micahel reaction, we investigated the reaction of pyrrolidine (2) with g-crotonolactone (3) in the presence of the simple ureas 5 and 7, 17) thioureas 6 and 8, 17) and guanidine 9 as catalysts (Fig. 2).These reactions were performed under Mendoza's conditions, [23][24][25][26] i.e., the ratio of 2, 3 and catalyst was 1 : 1 : 0.1, and the concentrations of the substrate 2 and 3 were set at 0.3 M in CDCl 3 . The accelerating activities of the catalysts for this hetero-Michael reaction were determined by measuring the t 1/2 (monitored by 1 H-NMR), and the results are summarized in Table 1.The urea 5 and thiourea 6 accelerated this conjugate addition reaction 3.0 and 2.6-fold, respectively, over the uncatalyzed reaction as expected. From the consideration of the reaction mechanism (vide infra), introduction of EWGs on the aromatic rings of 5 and/or 6 was expected to increase their catalytic activity. In fact, catalysts 7 ...