Playing with rings: Organocatalytic Approaches to Stereodefined Carbo- and Heterocyclic Scaffolds

Most of the compounds prepared in academic and industrial laboratories incorporate cyclic substructures with different levels of complexity within their structure. In this sense, the different approaches available for the construction of cyclic scaffolds can be classified into three groups (1) intramolecular reactions, (2) cycloaddition reactions and (3) transannular reactions. Moreover, achieving stereocontrol in the formation of the target compound is also of particular relevance, especially considering that chirality is a major theme in the design, discovery, development and marketing of new drugs. In this lecture several milestones and relevant contributions carried out by our group will be presented in which these three different approaches have been used to access to relatively complex hetero- or carbocyclic architectures. In all cases, we have used different organocatalytic activation manifolds as the methodological tool for the activation of the reagents and for controlling the stereochemical outcome of the reaction.