Control of stereogenic oxygen in a helically chiral oxonium ion
Nature(2023)
Abstract
The control of tetrahedral carbon stereocentres remains a focus of modern synthetic chemistry and is enabled by their configurational stability. By contrast, trisubstituted nitrogen 1 , phosphorus 2 and sulfur compounds 3 undergo pyramidal inversion, a fundamental and well-recognized stereochemical phenomenon that is widely exploited 4 . However, the stereochemistry of oxonium ions—compounds bearing three substituents on a positively charged oxygen atom—is poorly developed and there are few applications of oxonium ions in synthesis beyond their existence as reactive intermediates 5 , 6 . There are no examples of configurationally stable oxonium ions in which the oxygen atom is the sole stereogenic centre, probably owing to the low barrier to oxygen pyramidal inversion 7 and the perception that all oxonium ions are highly reactive. Here we describe the design, synthesis and characterization of a helically chiral triaryloxonium ion in which inversion of the oxygen lone pair is prevented through geometric restriction to enable it to function as a determinant of configuration. A combined synthesis and quantum calculation approach delineates design principles that enable configurationally stable and room-temperature isolable salts to be generated. We show that the barrier to inversion is greater than 110 kJ mol −1 and outline processes for resolution. This constitutes, to our knowledge, the only example of a chiral non-racemic and configurationally stable molecule in which the oxygen atom is the sole stereogenic centre.
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Key words
Synthetic chemistry methodology,Reaction mechanisms,Stereochemistry,Science,Humanities and Social Sciences,multidisciplinary
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