Carbonyl-substituted allenes are highly important synthetic intermediates for a number of heterocycles and strained-ring systems. However, chemistry of allenyl aldehydes has not been explored because of a lack of general synthetic methods. Professor Yong Huang’s group at Peking University, Shenzhen Graduate School, reported the first direct α-vinylidenation of aldehydes and an α-vinylidenation/γ-functionalization cascade to synthesize tri- and tetrasubstituted allenyl aldehydes using a combination of a gold catalyst and an secondary amine, a strategy called synergistic catalysis. Their method enables rapid access to polysubstituted furans from aldehydes. This work was recently published at Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. (2013, 52, 14219-14223). This work was supported by 973 programs and the Shenzhen Peacock program. The research efforts were carried out by graduate students Zhaofeng Wang and Xijian Li at PKUSZ.
The article can be accessed at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201308835/pdf and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201310080/pdf