“…Both 5-phenyl-1,3-dioxolane-4-one (DOX) and alkyl-DOX are part of this group, and their simple, synthetic accessibility has been proven by the fact that fewer toxic resources were used as ring-closing agents for mandelic acid ( 1 ) in acetone or cyclohexane, giving good isolated yields. Having observed this new frontier of compounds, we have investigated the possibility of replacing phosgene-derived OCA with DOX, which was obtained from paraformaldehyde, and with methyl- and ethyl-DOX, which were synthetized from trimethyl and triethyl orthoformate (TMOF and TEOF) [ 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 ], as illustrated in Figure 3 .…”