All that glitters is gold: Gold cyclization reaction provides important building blocks for pharmaceuticals
Friday, January 7, 2011 - 11:50
in Physics & Chemistry
(PhysOrg.com) -- In many significant natural products, furans are a key motif. These oxygen-containing five-membered heterocycles are also versatile building blocks in the construction of highly complex target structures. As such, they are important scaffolds in organic and pharmaceutical chemistry. As reported in the European Journal of Organic Chemistry, A. Stephen K. Hashmi and a team at Universitat Heidelberg (Germany) have now introduced a general protocol for the preparation of highly substituted furans through a gold-catalyzed cyclization reaction.