Synthesis of 5-Dehydronellionol Tri-O-methyl Ether

Abstract

In a recent communication¹ we proposed a corrected structure la for 5-dehydronellionol. Rao and co-workers first isolated this natural product² and they had previously advanced structure 2a which we felt did not reflect accurately the spectral information available. To support our conctention we synthesised the tri-O-methyl ether 2b by an unambiguous route to find, as expected, that this compound is quite differenc to that described in the literature. We have now completed a synthesis of 5-dehydronellionol as the di-O-methyl ether lla and the tri-O-methyl ether lb (llb).