A multi-substrate screening approach for the identification of a broadly applicable Diels-Alder catalyst

When developing a synthetic methodology, chemists generally optimize a single substrate and then explore the substrate scope of their method. This approach has led to innumerable and widely-used chemical reactions. However, it frequently provides methods that only work on model substrate-like compounds. Perhaps worse, reaction conditions that would enable the conversion of other substrates may be missed. We now show that a different approach, originally proposed by Kagan, in which a collection of structurally distinct substrates are evaluated in a single reaction vessel, can not only provide information on the substrate scope at a much earlier stage in methodology development, but even lead to a broadly applicable synthetic methodology. Using this multi-substrate screening approach, we have identified an efficient and stereoselective imidodiphosphorimidate organocatalyst for scalable Diels–Alder reactions of cyclopentadiene with different classes of α,β-unsaturated aldehydes.
Investigation of a reaction scope usually starts with the optimization for a model substrate. Here, the authors apply a time-efficient multi-substrate screening approach to identify a general organocatalyst for the Diels–Alder reaction of cyclopentadiene with α,β-unsaturated aldehydes.