Hydrolase–like catalysis and structural resolution of natural products by a metal–organic framework
The exact chemical structure of non–crystallising natural products is still one of the main challenges in Natural Sciences. Despite tremendous advances in total synthesis, the absolute structural determination of a myriad of natural products with very sensitive chemical functionalities remains undone. Here, we show that a metal–organic framework (MOF) with alcohol–containing arms and adsorbed water, enables selective hydrolysis of glycosyl bonds, supramolecular order with the so–formed chiral fragments and absolute determination of the organic structure by single–crystal X–ray crystallography in a single operation. This combined strategy based on a biomimetic, cheap, robust and multigram available solid catalyst opens the door to determine the absolute configuration of ketal compounds regardless degradation sensitiveness, and also to design extremely–mild metal–free solid–catalysed processes without formal acid protons. ; This work was supported by the Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca (Italy) and the MINECO (Spain) (Projects CTQ2016-75671-P, CTQ 2017-86735-P, RTC-2017-6331-5, Severo Ochoa program SEV-2016-0683 and Excellence Unit "Maria de Maeztu" MDM-2015-0538). R.B. thanks the MIUR (Project PON R&I FSE-FESR 2014–2020) for grant. L.B wishes to thank Italian MIUR for grant n. AIM1899391–1 in the framework of the project "Azione I.2, Mobilità dei Ricercatori, PON R&I 2014–2020". Thanks are also extended to the "2019 Post-doctoral Junior Leader-Retaining Fellowship, la Caixa Foundation (ID100010434 and fellowship code LCF/BQ/PR19/11700011" (J. F.- S.). S. S.-N. thanks ITQ for the concession of a contract. D.A. acknowledges the financial support of the Fondazione CARIPLO/"Economia Circolare: ricerca per un futuro sostenibile" 2019, Project code: 2019–2090, MOCA. E.P. acknowledges the financial support of the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program/ERC Grant Agreement No. 814804, MOF-reactors.