Construction of Carbocyclic Ring of Indoles Using Ruthenium-Catalyzed Ring-Closing Olefin Metathesis
Synthesis of highly substituted indoles using a RCM approach.
Yoshida and Yanagisawa (Chiba University) have just published an intriguing paper on the synthesis of indoles. Which makes the paper intriguing and I think potentially useful for medicinal chemists looking for complicated scaffolds is the approach they follow: a Ring Closure Methatesis (RCM) using as substrate a pyrrole with the appropriate vinyl groups and so on. 14 examples are reported, including some structures which would be probably difficult to prepare following the opposite approach (that is, formation of the five membered ring starting from a benzene). Specially recommended for Library Managers.
Org. Lett., Article ASAP. See: 10.1021/ol201510u
Freak Corner. Did you know that in Japan the names are written with the surname followed by the name? That is, if you meet Uchida Kazuhiro, his family name is really Uchida, while Kazuhiro is the proper name, reserved only for close friends. For the rest of people, depending on the circumstances, he would be Uchida-san, Uchida-sensei or similar. However, many Japanese people change their names to the Western style, specially when making business or publishing a paper, as in this case. And a last curiosity: Tanaka is a very, very common surname in Japan, the equivalent to the Spanish López or the American Smith, though it can sound very exotic to us.
