preparation of thermodynamic silyl enol ethers

Tetrahedron Letters,Vol.24,No.l3,pp 1345-1348,1983

There now exist a variety of mild and very selective procedures for the kinetic
deprotonation of unsymmetrical ketones employing alkali metal dialkylamides. The "kinetic"
enolates produced in this way may be efficiently trapped by trimethylsilyl chloride to
regiospecifically provide the less substituted trimethylsilyl enol ethers.1 Despite the
recent introduction of several new methods, there are still no procedures available which
allow direct3 regiospecific preparation of the more substituted "thermodynamic" enolates or
trimethylsilyl enol ethers.

 

this paper described a way using MeMgBr/diisopropylamine to generate the thermodynamic enolate at rt, which worked out as described.(HMPA is necessary, without it, no rxn at all).