Unlocking the Friedel-Crafts arylation of primary aliphatic alcohols and epoxides driven by hexafluoroisopropanol
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alcohols and epoxides are arguably ideal electrophiles for the Friedel-Crafts alkylation, since they are widely available, require no pre-activation, and produce no stoichiometric waste beyond water. However, neither primary aliphatic alcohols nor most classes of terminal epoxides are compatible with existing intermolecular Friedel-Crafts methodologies, and sequential Friedel-Crafts reactions starting from epoxides consequently remain underexplored. Here, we report that these limitations are easily overcome using Brønsted acid catalysis in hexafluoroisopropanol (HFIP) as a solvent. Electron-poor aromatic epoxides and aliphatic epoxides undergo stereospecific arylation to give an alcohol which, depending on the reaction conditions, can partake in a second nucleophilic substitution with a different arene in one pot. Phenyl ethanols react through a phenonium intermediate, whereas simple aliphatic alcohols participate in a rare intermolecular S N 2 Friedel-Crafts process, delivering linear products exclusively. This work provides an alternative to metal-catalyzed cross-couplings for accessing important scaffolds, widening the range of applications of the Friedel-Crafts reaction.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it