Enamine enables Rawal's Diene for Diels-Alder Deliciousness
In fun news, I recently defended my PhD! I've been busy the past month with that process, but hopefully I'll be back to biweekly posts for the forseeable future. Citation: Shamrai, O.I.; Iermolenko, I.A.; Ostapchuk, E.N.; Leha, D.O.; Zarudnitskii, E.V.; Ryabukhin, S.V.; Volochnyuk, D.M. Shackles Off: A Kilo Scale Synthesis of Rawal's Diene. Org. Process. Res. Dev. 2025 , ASAP. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.oprd.5c00039 Summary Figure: Background: The Diels-Alder reaction is one of the most powerful tools in organic synthesis for quickly generating complex products. In one step, you're forming two C-C bonds, a 6-member ring, the stereochemistry is controllable with robust models, and you still have an alkene as a functional group handle for further manipulations. If you're proposing a retrosynthesis and have a key cyclohexane ring, you'd be crazy not to at least consider using a cycloaddition. When you plan out a Diels Alder reaction, one of the key p...