Question

Let’s draw these three paths to start.

Now we can begin to work backward, let's look at the final product. We see that we have an alkene, what reactions do we know that can make alkenes. We could start with an alcohol and we can do an acid catalyzed dehydration. We could also do an elimination reaction. Ideally we would have a good leaving group and we could do a base catalyzed E2 elimination. We also recently learned about the Wittig reaction that can produce alkenes from carbonyls and phosphorus ylides. Let's draw these three paths to start. H2SO4 ОН H20 Heat Base Br H2C=PPh3 All three of these paths would be completely legitimate ways to make the final product. We could continue to work backward from any of these. However, the final Wittig gives us the alkene from a starting material with only a cyclohexane ring. This is the biggest jump and is the intermediate most