10.1002/cbic.201800458
ChemBioChem
FULL PAPER
Highly Enantioselective Synthesis and Anticancer Activities of
Chiral Conjugated Diynols
[a]‡
[a]‡
[a]
[a]
[a]
[a]
Ke Zhang,[a] Chun Zhang, Zhong-Hong He, Jian Huang, Xi Du, Li Wang, Si-Ping Wei, Lin
‡
Pu*[a][b] and Qin Wang*[a][b]
‡.These authors contributed equally to this work.
Abstract: A chiral amino alcohol-based ligand is found to promote
the highly enantioselective addition of terminal conjugated diynes to
aromatic and aliphatic aldehydes. The easily available C2 symmetric
(R)- and (S)-BINOL in combination with Ti(OiPr)4, Zn powder and EtI
are also found to catalyze the asymmetric 1,3-diyne addition to
aldehydes under mild reaction conditions, which allows the
preparation of both enantiomers of the chiral conjugated diynols with
high enantioselectivity. The resulting optically active conjugated
diynols are found to have potential anticancer activities with
significant differences against HepG2 and HeLa cancer cells, and
remarkable enantioselective cytotoxicity is observed for the first time.
requires enantioselective 1,3-diyne addition to aldehydes to
generate the chiral diynols in a single chemical procedure. A
number of catalytic systems have been reported for the
asymmetric addition of alkynes to aldehydes in the past few
years 11; however the enantioselective addition of diynes as well
as the substrate scope is very limited because of the higher
conjugative stability of the diyne nucleophiles than that of simple
alkynes12-14
.
Chiral amino alcohol and 1,1’-binaphth-2-ol (BINOL)-based
reaction systems have been developed for the enantioselective
addition of diynes. For example, Carreira et al reported the
addition of a diyne to aliphatic aldehydes by using Zn(OTf)2 and
(+)-N-methylephedrine, but it needed a large excess of the chiral
amino alcohol with only moderate enantioselectivity12a. After the
initial report by Carreira, Jiang et al studied the use of several
analogues of (+)-N-methylephedrine15, but little work was done
on developing conditions directly applicable to the diyne addition.
Trost et al demonstrated a catalytic enantioselective diyne
addition to aldehydes by using another chiral amino alcohol
named as (S, S)-ProPhenol in the presence of ZnMe2 and
triphenylphosphine oxide13, but moderate enantioselectivity was
obtained for the addition of buta-1,3-diynyltriisopropylsilane, a
diyne substituted with a triisopropylsilyl (TIPS), to aliphatic
aldehydes with linear or secondary alkyl groups and no result
was reported for the reaction of substituted aromatic aldehydes.
(S)-BINOL in combination with ZnEt2 and Ti(OiPr)4 was found to
catalyze the highly enantioselective addition of various 1,3-
diynes to aldehydes. In this catalytic system, biscyclohexylamine
(Cy2NH) was added to facilitate the deprotonation of a terminal
1,3-diyne to form a nucleophilic diynylzinc16, and this method
was very efficient for synthesizing chiral falcardiol analogues
from buta-1,3-diynyltriisopropylsilane in short steps17. However,
the use of ZnEt2 in this method limits its application in industrial
production due to its moist and air-sensitivity and pyrophoric
property. Recently, we improved this method by using the
BINOL-Ti(OiPr)4 complex to activate the reaction of Zn powder
with EtI, but only the enantioselective simple alkyne addition to
aromatic aldehydes was reported and the use of conjugated
diynes was not examined18. Herein, we report that the chiral
amino alcohol-based ligand, (1S, 2S)-2-N,N-dimethylamino-1-(p-
Introduction
Polyacetylenes are a large group of natural products occurring in
many medicinal and dietary plants1. Among the most biologically
active polyacetylenes, conjugated diacetylenes are important
building blocks because of the unique properties of the
consecutive triple bonds2. In addition, optically active propargyl
alcohols with a stereogenic hydroxyl group are of particular
interest due to the diverse biological activities of these diyne
carbinols3. The interesting bioactivities and therapeutic
potentials of these secondary metabolites from plants have been
increasingly recognized. For example, the chiral conjugated
diynes of the falcarinol type, isolated from Panax ginseng,
notoginseng, carrots, celery and parsley, have exhibited
potential anticancer activities in a mammalian in vivo model,
which may improve human health and well-being4-10. However,
the potentially different cytotoxic effect of the opposite
enantiomers of these conjugated chiral diynols is still unknown.
Using the conventional synthetic methods to prepare the
enantiomers of the chiral conjugated diynols has proved more
challenging2. Usually, they can be prepared by asymmetric
ynone reductions to form chiral propargyl alcohols, followed by
copper-catalyzed
Cadiot-Chodkiewicz
cross-coupling
to
introduce the second acetylene unit 8-9. A shorter pathway
[a]
[b]
Mr. K. Zhang, Dr. C. Zhang, Mr. Z.-H. He, Mr. J. Huang, Ms. X. Du,
Dr. L. Wang, Dr. S.-P. Wei, Prof. Dr. Q. Wang
Department of Medicinal Chemistry, Center for Pharmaceutical
Research and Development, School of Pharmacy
Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, Sichuan 646000, PRC
nitrophenyl)-3-(t-butyldimethyl-silyloxy)
propane-1-ol,
can
promote the highly enantioselective addition of terminal diynes
to aliphatic and aromatic aldehydes. The easily available C2
symmetric (R)- and (S)-BINOL in combination with Ti(OiPr)4, Zn
powder and EtI, can also catalyze the highly enantioselective
1,3-diyne addition to aldehydes under mild reaction conditions.
Moreover, the resulting optically active conjugated diynols are
found to have potential anti-proliferative activities with significant
differences against HepG2 and HeLa cancer cells, and
Prof. L. Pu
Department of Chemistry
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4319, USA
Supporting information for this article is given via a link at the end of
the document.
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