Cyclopentitol as a scaffold for a natural product-like compound library for drug discovery.

A concise and efficient synthesis of cyclopentitols as a scaffold for a two-dimensional compound library for drug discovery is described. Starting from d-mannose, the key steps are Wittig olefination and ring-closing metathesis (RCM) followed by a [3,3]-sigmatropic Overmann rearrangement to form an sp(3)-rich, natural product-like scaffold from which a focused compound library with different functionalities is prepared.