Diastereoselective One-Pot Synthesis of Oxazolines Using Sulfur Ylides and Acyl Imines.

This work describes an extended version of the Corey-Chaykovsky reaction to access oxazolines using sulfur ylides and stable precursors of acyl imines. The reaction proceeds through a mixture of aziridines and oxazolines, which provides the trans-oxazolines following in situ Heine-type aziridine ring expansion upon treatment with BF3·OEt2. Following the same one-pot procedure, amidine imides react with the sulfur ylides to provide imidazolines.