It
is difficult to subject simple reaction starting materials
to
a “one-pot” in situ tandem reaction without post-treatment
under mild reaction conditions to obtain multimers with complex structural
linkages. In organic synthesis, acetal reactions are often used to
protect derivatives containing carbonyl functional groups. Therefore,
acetal products tend to have very low stability, and performing multi-step
condensation to obtain complex multimeric products is difficult. Herein,
we achieved the first efficient multiple condensation of o-vanillin derivatives using Dy(OAc)3·6H2O undergoing a “one-pot” in situ tandem reaction under
mild solvothermal conditions to obtain a series of dimers (I and II,
clusters 1 and 2) and trimers (I and II,
clusters 3 and 4). When methanol or ethanol
is used as the solvent, the alcoholic solvent participates in acetal
and dehydration reactions to obtain dimers (I and II). Surprisingly,
when using acetonitrile as the reaction solvent, the o-vanillin derivatives undergo acetal and dehydration reactions to
obtain trimers (I and II). In addition, clusters 1–4 all showed distinct single-molecule magnetic behaviors under zero-field
conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that
multiple acetal reactions catalyzed by coordination-directed catalysis
under “one-pot” conditions have been realized, opening
a new horizon for the development of fast, facile, green, and efficient
synthetic methods for complex compounds.