Large-Scale Green Chemical Synthesis of Adjacent Quaternary Chiral Centers by Continuous Flow Photodecarbonylation of Aqueous Suspensions of Nanocrystalline Ketones

Abstract

To demonstrate the ease of scale-up and synthetic potential of some organic solid state reactions, we report the synthesis, crystallization, and solid state photochemistry of acyclic, homochiral, hexasubstituted (+)-(2R,4S)-2-carbomethoxy-4-cyano-2,4-diphenyl-3-pentanone 1. We demonstrate that solid state photodecarbonylation of (+)-(2R,4S)-1 affords (+)-(2R,3R)-2-carbomethoxy-3-cyano-2,3-diphenyl-butane 2 with two adjacent stereogenic, all-carbon substituted quaternary centers, in quantitative chemical yield and 100% diastereoselectivity and enantiomeric excess. The efficient multigram photodecarbonylation of (+)-(2R,4S)-1 as a nanocrystalline suspension in water using a continuous flow photoreactor shows that the large-scale synthesis of synthetically challenging compounds using photochemical synthesis in the solid state can be executed in a remarkably simple manner.