Cafestol to Tricalysiolide B and Oxidized Analogues: Biosynthetic and Derivatization Studies Using Non-heme Iron Catalyst Fe(PDP)

The tricalysiolides are a recently isolated class of diterpene natural products featuring the carbon backbone of the well-known coffee extract, cafestol. Herein we validate the use of our non-heme iron complex, Fe(PDP), as an oxidative tailoring enzyme mimic to test the proposal that this class of natural products derives from cafestol via cytochrome P-450-mediated furan oxidation. Thereafter, as predicted by computational analysis, C-H oxidation derivatization studies provided a novel 2° alcohol product as a single diastereomer.