Abstract
Our preceding studies have shown that lithio carbanions of protected cyanohydrins can undergo Michael additions to an isoprenic sulfoxide to yield lithio derivatives of allylic sulfoxides1. These results have led us to investigate the utilization of these lithio sulfoxides for new simple syntheses of aliphatic terpenes by head-to-tail linking of functionalized isoprenoid units. For this purpose, 1,2-epoxy-2-methyl-3-butene 2 was one especially appropriate electro-phile, but at the outset of our work, there had been very few investigations of the reactivity of lithio carbanions of allylic sulfoxides with epoxides2