A C–H oxidation approach for streamlining synthesis of chiral polyoxygenated motifs

Chiral oxygenated molecules are pervasive in natural products and medicinal agents; however, their chemical syntheses often necessitate numerous, wasteful steps involving functional group and oxidation state manipulations. Herein a strategy for synthesizing a readily diversifiable class of chiral building blocks, allylic alcohols, through sequential asymmetric C–H activation/resolution is evaluated against the state-of-the-art. The C–H oxidation routes' capacity to strategically introduce oxygen into a sequence and thereby minimize non-productive manipulations is demonstrated to effect significant decreases in overall step-count and increases in yield and synthetic flexibility.

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