I have been in Florida over the past four days, doing a bunch of things that loosely relate to peptide science. In fact, Orlando is where the American Peptide Society Meeting will be held in 2015. I found Miami to be particularly hot, and I suspect that Orlando will be even more so when our conference is held there in June 2015. But at least we will have a first class program for all of you peptide aficionados!
When I got home and sat in front of my computer, the first thing I noticed was a very cool JACS paper by Professor Shu-Li Yu. The authors describe a palladium system that allows for highly regioselective allylation of substituted pyrroles at the C-2 position. While the regioselectivity is largely driven by the relative steric congestion at the more likely allylation site (the NH), the overall dearomatization of the pyrrole core deserves attention and is very impressive. The products of this transformation are chiral aza-dienes that will almost certainly generate attention in the synthesis community. Noting unusual selectivity is often a sure recipe for a productive research project, and Yu’s paper is no exception. The best thing is that complexity clearly increases in this reaction, which always pleases one’s eye (and is not always what we see in the literature these days).
amphoteros 