The intramolecular hydroacylation of 1,2-disubstituted alkenes was considered to be a challenging task due to the side reactions resulted from the lack of additional substituent at 1-position and the low activity caused by the steric hindrance of substituent at 2-position, and an asymmetric version has not been considered possible due to problems associated with the racemization of the products. We
A modularly built bisubstrateinhibitor, the natural product pepticinnamin E (shown on the right) was sythesized for the first time. In the case of in vitro assays it inhibits the enzyme farnesyltransferase with respect to both the peptide substrate and farnesylpyrophosphate (KI = 30 and 8 μM, respectively). The inhibitoryactivity is decisively influenced by the central tripeptide unit and the absolute