During the seminar, an overview of recent projects carried out in the Laboratory of Chemical Synthesis Methodology will be presented. These will include the development of two novel synthetic reactions leading to important structural motifs, present in many molecules of biological and pharmaceutical relevance, and proceeding under mild, environmentally-friendly conditions: (1) the synthesis of aryl sulfides by metal-free arylation of thiols with diaryliodonium salts and (2) the regioselective Morita-Baylis-Hillman reaction with N-alkylpyridinium salts as electrophiles.

The second part of the talk will be devoted to our collaborative studies on the mechanisms of (3) the oxidative dearomatization of phenols (with A. Drabińska from FUW and R. Solarska from CeNT) and (4) the reaction catalyzed by methyltransferase TrmD (with J. Sułkowska from CeNT and Y.-M. Hou from T. Jefferson University), which were conducted using experimental and theoretical approaches.