General Synthesis of Cyclopropanols via Organometallic Addition to 1-Sulfonylcyclopropanols as Cyclopropanone Precursors

The addition of organometallic reagents to ketones constitutes one of the most straightforward synthetic approaches to tertiary alcohols. However, due to the absence of a well-behaved class of cyclopropanone surrogates accessible in enantioenriched form, such a trivial synthetic disconnection has only received very little attention in the literature for the formation of tertiary cyclopropanols. In this work, we report a simple and high-yielding synthesis 1-substituted cyclopropanols via the addition of diverse organometallic reagents to 1- phenylsulfonylcyclopropanols, acting here as in situ precursors of the corresponding cyclopropanones.The transformation is shown to be amenable to sp, sp2 or sp3 -hybridized organometallic C-nucleophiles under mild conditions, and the use of enantioenriched substrates led to highly diastereoselective additions and the formation of optically active cyclopropanols.