Abstract:
The efficient synthesis of natural products, drugs, agrochemicals and materials is a very important aspect in academia and industry. To allow an ecologically and economically favourable approach in a green fashion the former stepwise procedures must be replaced by domino reactions which allow the preparation of complex molecules starting from simple substrates in a straight forward way. Domino reactions1 allow the reduction of the amount of waste being formed and the preservation of our resources. Moreover, they are also favourable in an economical way since they consume less time and less material.
The usefulness of the domino concept[1] is demonstrated with the syntheses of some fungal metabolites as blennolide A[2] and secalonic acid E[3] with a dimeric tetrahydroxanthenone skeleton using an enantioselective domino-Wacker/carbonylation/methoxylation reaction and of the natural aryldihydronaphthalene lignan linoxepine[4] employing a domino-carbopalladation/Heck reaction. The approach has also been applied for the synthesis of novel materials such as molecular switches[5a-e] and fluorescence dyes[6a,b] using a domino-Sonogashira/ carbopalladation/CH-activation reaction.
Biography:
Lutz F. Tietze studied chemistry at the universities of Freiburg and Kiel, Germany and obtained his doctorate in 1968 in Kiel. He then worked as a research associate with Prof. G. Büchi at MIT, Cambridge, USA for two years and got his habilitation at the University of Münster in 1975. He got several calls as professor to different universities and has been professor and director of the Institute of Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen since 1978. He has received many awards as the very prestigious Emil Fischer Gold medal of the German Chemical Society. He is member of several academies and got the title of doctor honoris causa of the University of Szeged and Goettingen. He was head of a Collaborative Research Centre (Sonderforschungsbereich), has served as a member of the DFG-Panel (Fachforum) for eight years and was dean and vice dean of the faculty of chemistry in Göttingen again for eight years and he is President of the German Stirring Committee of the German Chemical Societies (DZfCh).He has almost 500 scientific papers, 38 patents and six books to his name. His research focuses on the development of efficient and selective synthetic methods using domino reactions and the development of new selective anticancer agents employing monoclonal antibodies. He has educated 180 PhD-students and a multitude of postdoctoral fellows have worked with him.
