Department of Chemistry Seminar - Highly Selective Functionalization of Unactivated Alkenes

Speaker: Professor Guosheng LIU

Institution: Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China   

Hosted By: Professor Zhenyang LIN

Abstract

Simple alkenes, including terminal, internal and the mixtures of their isomers, are readily available and inexpensive feedstocks from refineries, and so represent the most attractive starting materials for alkene functionalization. The direct functionalization of alkenes presents a straightforward approach for expeditiously increasing the complexity of alkene starting materials for target molecule synthesis. Although it has been studied extensively in the past several decades, the enantio- and regioselective functionalization of simple unactivated alkenes (that is, with only alkyl groups attached) still remains great challenge, particularly for the reactions of internal alkenes. This talk will focus on the ligand design to promote alkene activation by palladium catalyst, which can be used to carry out the oxidative difunctionalization of alkenes, including terminal and internal alkenes, in which the regio- and enantioselectivity could be well controlled by ligands. In addition, the remoted oxidation of internal alkenes will be also discussed, which leads to the highly selective functionalization of alkene mixtures.