Three in the spotlight: Photoinduced stereoselective synthesis of (Z)-acyloxyacrylamides through a multicomponent approach.

We report a straightforward approach to synthesize 2-acyloxyacrylamides, which are useful synthons in organic synthesis. This involves a photoactivated multicomponent reaction, performed both in batch and under continuous flow conditions. This process affords the desired compounds in a stereoselective fashion from readily available starting materials in one step, without the aid of metal catalysis. This paper illustrates the preliminary work, the extensive experiments carried out to understand the limitations of the approach, and the optimization of the conditions for the synthesis of these particular captodative olefins.