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Sulfur ylides can be used in the asymmetric syntheses of epoxides and aziridines, but they rarely are because the reactions haven’t been capable of producing synthetically useful compounds with high diastereo- and enantioselectivity. Furthermore, the strategy usually requires a tedious multistep synthesis to make a chiral sulfide as the ylide precursor. Now, Varinder K. Aggarwal and coworkers of the University of Bristol, in England, have developed a chiral sulfide that gets around both problems (J. Am. Chem. Soc., DOI: 10.1021/ja9100276). By heating elemental sulfur with limonene in the presence of γ-terpinene, they produce isothiocineole, a chiral sulfide that costs less than $1.00 per gram to make. Aggarwal’s team found isothiocineole exhibits outstanding selectivities in sulfur ylide-mediated asymmetric epoxidations and aziridinations. The researchers simply convert the sulfide to a benzylic or allylic sulfonium salt and react it with aldehydes or imines to produce epoxides or aziridines, respectively, with “perfect enantioselectivities and the highest diastereoselectivities reported to date,” the researchers say. The isothiocineole, they write, “should change sulfur ylide-mediated epoxidation into a scalable, mainstream practical method.”
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