Palladium-Catalyzed Ring Restructuring Reactions of Oxazolidines for the Construction of Heterocyclic Compounds

Heterocyclic compounds is one kind of the most common and important organic molecules, which can be widely found in natural products, medicinal molecules and organic functional materials. At present, a lot of methods have been developed for the synthesis of heterocyclic compounds. Among them, ring restructuring reaction as an emerging popular strategy can provide a straightforward and efficient approach for the synthesis of heterocyclic compounds from simple cyclic molecules. Over the past several decades, the transformations from three- and four-membered structures to complexed heterocyclic compounds have received extensive attention. In contrast, ring-opening transformations involving five- and six-membered rings are still posing challenges, due to the high dissociation energy of these molecules.

Oxazolidines as simple and common saturated five membered heterocycles have gained considerable attention due to their broad biological profiles in medicinal chemistry, and these structural motifs are also diffusely explored as chiral ligands, organocatalysts and chiral building blocks. However, there is few work involving ring restructuring reaction of oxazolidines. This project will focus on the development of palladium-catalyzed ring restructuring reactions of oxazolidines for the synthesis of heterocyclic compounds. The two key objectives are: (i) to develop new and innovative processes based on palladium-catalyzed ring restructuring reactions of oxazolidines. (ii) to offer a variety of useful heterocyclic compounds.