Seminar Abstract:

Many natural products and pharmaceuticals have complex polycyclic structures that present synthetic challenges. There are many powerful reactions (Diels-Alder, Pauson-Khand, Grubbs ring-closing metathesis, Wender arene-alkene photocycloadditions, and others), but new ring formations are always in high demand. For the last 20 years, my group has pioneered in the development of more than twenty new Rh-catalyzed ring-forming reactions. Applications of these new reactions in total synthesis has been demonstrated by us and by other research groups. I will discuss the development and mechanistic elaboration of several transition metal-catalyzed reactions to construct difficult seven- and eight-membered rings, as well as applications of these reactions for the synthesis of natural products. In the second part of the talk, I will describe our recent discovery of a new mild arene hydrogenation reaction that occurs at room temperature under 1 atmosphere of hydrogen gas, and this will provide a convenient approach to reach a variety of useful saturated six-membered rings in synthesis.

Speaker Bio:

Zhi-Xiang Yu is a Chang-Jiang Professor of Chemistry at Peking University, where he leads the Theoretical and Synthetic Organic Chemistry Laboratory. His research integrates computational chemistry and organic synthesis to understand reaction mechanisms, develop new catalytic reactions, and synthesize natural products and pharmaceutical molecules. Born in Ezhou, Hubei Province, China, he earned his B.S. from Wuhan University and his M.S. from Peking University before completing his Ph.D. in computational chemistry at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology under the supervision of Yun-Dong Wu. He carried out postdoctoral research at University of California, Los Angeles with K. N. Houk and M. Mascal before joining the faculty at Peking University in 2004. Yu has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Duke University, University of British Columbia, and California Institute of Technology, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.