One-pot Photochemical Syntheses of Polycyclic Aromatic Quinones

Abstract

Polycyclic aromatic compounds are recently of much interest because of their expected physicochemical and biochemical properties. However, the wider-ranging studies on the nature of polycyclic aromatic compounds have been hampered partly because of the lack of the general and facile regioselective synthetic route to these compounds so far. The authors have developed a new method to synthesize benz[a]anthracene-7, 12-diones [ 3] by the photochemical reaction of 2-bromo-3-methoxy-1, 4-naphthoquinone [1 a] with 1, 1-diarylethylene [2]. Employing the reaction, the authors synthesized a large number of polycyclic aromatic compounds. This methodology provides us a general one-pot regioselective synthetic route to a variety of polycyclic aromatic compounds.