Bruce A. Arndtsen, James McGill Professor of Chemistry
Chemistry Department, McGill University
Montreal, Canada

Metal Catalyzed Tandem and Multicomponent Coupling Reactions Powered by CO

Transition metal catalysis has become a powerful tool in designing new classes of bond forming reactions. In addition, there has been growing interest in exploiting the reactivity of metal catalysts to mediate a series of operations at once, as these can potentially allow the spontaneous build-up of complex compounds in a single operation (e.g. tandem, cascade or multicomponent reactions).

Our lab has been actively exploring this latter concept, with the general goal of designing efficient synthetic routes of products directly from multiple simple building blocks. A feature of many of these transformations is the use of a readily available small molecule, carbon monoxide, to create products that are themselves reactive (e.g. acid chlorides, 1,3-dipoles, etc), and can therefore undergo subsequent, spontaneous transformations.

This talk will describe our development of these transformations, their mechanism, as well as their application to the modular generation of products as diverse as pharmaceutical cores, super electrophiles, or new classes of polymers, from combinations of available substrates.

Biography
Research in his group focuses on the discovery and mechanistic understanding of new approaches to chemical synthesis by transition metal catalysis. Their work has demonstrated that transition metal-based reactions can be used to design efficient, one step syntheses of a range of important core structures directly from available building blocks, as an alternative to classic multistep protocols. His group has also developed the general concept of using ion pairing with chiral anions as an alternative to chiral ligands in asymmetric transition metal catalysis. More recently, his lab has discovered new classes of 1,3-dipoles for use in cycloaddition reactions (phospha-Münchnones), as well as approaches to polymer synthesis based upon metal catalyzed multicomponent reactions, and developed mechanistic insights into each of these metal catalyzed processes. 

Host: Professor Troels Skrydstrup, iNANO & Dept. of Chemistry, Aarhus University