A concise and efficient way to synthesize polyenic diones directly from α,β-unsaturated methyl ketones

A concise and efficient approach to polyenic compounds containing important diketone structural fragments is developed from readily available α,β-unsaturated methyl ketones in the presence of copper(II) oxide, iodine, and dimethyl sulfoxide. This is a new carbon–carbon double bond-forming reaction from two methyl sp3 C–H bonds and an attractive route to introduce the SMe group into the molecule from inexpensive dimethyl sulfoxide. The hypothetic self-sorting tandem reaction mechanism is also proposed in this paper.