Total Syntheses of Kopsaporine, Kopsinol and Kopsiloscine A

Kopsia alkaloids represent a complex class of natural products bearing a polycyclic ring system with two or three consecutive quaternary carbon centers. In this article, we report the first total synthesis of Kopsaporine related alkaloids. Features of our structure-unit-based strategy are an intramolecular Pummerer rearrangement induced nucleophilic cyclization/aza-Prins cyclization to construct the highly functional hexahydrocarbazole skeleton, an olefin migration vinylogous alkylation to establish the C20 all-carbon quaternary center, an iridium complex mediated radical addition to fuse the aspidofractine framework, an unprecedented IBX oxidation to introduce the α-hydroxyketone moiety, and a bioinspired retro-Aldol/Aldol reaction to convert kopsaporine to kopsiloscine A.