Dimitris Kalaitzakis

TL;DR: The purpose of this article is to give a taste of just how powerful the union between furans and photochemically-generated singlet oxygen is proving to be as a synthetic tool and to suggest that this chemistry is only now really coming of age.

TL;DR: These enzymatic reactions provide a simple, highly stereoselective and quantitative method for the synthesis of different diastereomers of valuable chiral synthons from non-chiral, easily accessible 1,3-diketones.

TL;DR: A highly efficient and general singlet-oxygen-initiated one-pot transformation of readily accessible furans into 5-hydroxy-1H-pyrrol-2(5H)-ones has been developed and the methodology was extended to the synthesis of other high-value α,β-unsaturated γ-lactams.

TL;DR: The biocatalytic reduction of α-alkyl-1,3-diketones and α-alksyl-β-keto esters employing 1 of 20 different isolated NADPH-dependent ketoreductases proved to be a highly efficient method for the preparation of optically pure keto alcohols or hydroxy esters.

TL;DR: This novel approach, which uses a singlet-oxygen-mediated reaction cascade, is particularly powerful because the one-pot reaction begins from furan substrates which can be variously functionalized (A, Scheme 1) with ease, thus allowing direct access to highly substituted scaffolds of type B (frequently with excellent stereoselectivity).