“…16 Transformation of vinyl sulfones 1 and 4 to lactones 2 and 5 and further on to termini-differentiated segments 3 and 6 was previously reported. 17,18 Unfortunately, base-mediated vinyl sulfone chemistry, established in several isomeric substrates, was uniformly unsuccessful for the preparation of allylic sulfone 7 from 4-ent. 19,20 Faced with a looming program deadline and encouraged by in silico modeling by Hirst, 21 which had previously calculated F-actin depolymerization ability, predicted pIC 50 values of 4.40, 4.08, and 4.05 for aplyronine A, aplyronine A C32 epi-methyl, and aplyronine A C32 desmethyl respectively.…”