Angew: Professor Rebek and Professor Yu Yang of Shanghai Univer make progress in the field of supramolecular catalysis

The research team of supramolecular chemistry led by Professor Julius Rebek Jr and Professor Yu Yang from the research center of supramolecular chemistry and catalysis of Shanghai University has made important progress in the construction of mesocyclic compounds by supramolecular catalysis The relevant research results have been published online recently in the international top Comprehensive Journal of chemistry, angew Chem Int ed (DOI: 10.1002 / anie 201808265) The first author is Dr Wu Naiwei, and Shanghai University is the first author and corresponding author Cyclic compounds play an important role in modern organic chemistry The synthesis of these compounds is very important because of the wide existence of cyclic structure in various natural products and drug molecules However, there are adverse cross ring tension and entropy effect in middle ring compounds, which lead to the synthesis of middle ring compounds (seven nine membered rings) is still a great challenge In this work, the team used the cavity of water-soluble cup-shaped supramolecular reactor to simulate the pocket of enzyme, through the effect of increasing water, the long-distance diene compound entered its cavity, creatively making the two end alkene functional groups close to each other, so that the olefin metathesis reaction took place under the action of hoveyda Grubbs II catalyst In this work, for the first time, the internal structure of the cavity of the supramolecular reactor was used to pre organize the spatial structure of the reactants, overcome the cross ring tension and entropy effect, and successfully synthesized the middle ring compounds The research work has been greatly supported by the construction of the peak plateau discipline of Shanghai University and the Oriental project of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission.