Expedient access to enantiopure cyclopentanic natural products: total synthesis of (-)-cyclonerodiol.

Following the principles of collective total synthesis, a number of natural products sharing an optically pure, multifunctional, cyclopentanic core were synthesized from a common precursor: plinol A (1). This intermediate was efficiently obtained in only four steps from (-)-linalool (2) using as the key step a Ti(III)-mediated diastereoselective radical cyclization. The feasibility of this approach was confirmed with the expedient enantiospecific synthesis of cyclonerodiol (3), and the formal synthesis of chocol G (4) and piperitone (5).