ACDC Catalysts

We then thought to carry out conjugate reduction of a,P-unsaturated ketones. However, neither these ACDC-catalysts, nor the commonly... 

S.C. PanandB. List s paper spans the whole field of current organocat-alysts discussing Lewis and Brpnsted basic and acidic catalysts. Starting from the development of proline-mediated enamine catalysis— the Hajos-Parrish-Eder-Sauer-Wiechert reaction is an intramolecular transformation involving enamine catalysis—into an intermolecular process with various electrophilic reaction partners as a means to access cY-functionalized aldehydes, they discuss a straightforward classification of organocatalysts and expands on Brpnsted acid-mediated transformations, and describe the development of asymmetric counteranion-directed catalysis (ACDC). 

In 2008, List s group developed an epoxidation using asymmetric counteranion-directed catalysis (ACDC) [177]. In this work, the epoxidation of 1,2-disubstituted enals (33) and (3,(3-disubstituted, a, 3-unsaturated aldehydes (115) was explored. Instead of using a chiral amine (e.g. Jprgensen-Hayashi s catalyst), an achiral amine and a chiral counteranion (a phosphoric acid derived from BINOL), were employed. 

Besides the utilization of chiral secondary amines to achieve a LUMO-lowering activation as well as face discrimination, the use of achiral secondary amines in combination with a chiral counterion also proved to be highly promising for such transformations. This strategy resembles the use of achiral metal catalysts in combination with a chiral ligand to achieve a stereoselective transformation (206-208). It is due to Benjamin List that the elegant concept of asymmetric counteranion-directed catalysis (ACDC) has found widespread applications in organocatalysis at the present time (209-212). 

In the case of enals, the most common catalysts are secondary chiral amines, which can be divided into two large groups (i) amines substituted with a bulky group and (ii) amines with hydrogen-bond-directing groups. Another possible type of catalyst for this activation mode arises from ACDC (asymmetric counterion direct catalysis) developed by List. In these catalysts either a chiral or non-chiral amine forms a chiral ionic pair with a chiral phosphoric acid. A different possibility is the use of a primary chiral amine and a strong acid. These latter methods have... 

Although a,P-unsaturated aldehydes have been used extensively in F-C alkylations since 2001, the first report on a,P-unsaturated enones as electrophiles appeared only in 2006 [51]. In this publication, indole reacts with 5-methyl-3-hexen-2-one to afford the desired product in moderate yield (52%) and low enantioselectivity (28% ee). One year later, two independent groups showed that the utilization of primary amines 9 and 10 derived from natural cinchona alkaloids facilitates the iminium formation with unsaturated enones instead of hindered secondary amine catalysts [15,16]. It should be emphasized that in both cases the use of an acidic co-catalyst is necessary to achieve the transformations. Nevertheless, only the second one, with catalyst 10, profited from an asymmetric counterion-directed organocatalytic system (ACDC) [52] (Scheme 35.3). 

Amino catalysts are one of the most dominant organocatalysts in the activation and transformation of aldehydes or ketones through enamine or iminium intermediates. Initially, the presence of an acid co-catalyst is crucial for the catalytic activation. Later it was reaUzed that the introduction of a chiral counteranion to the catalytic system enables the reactions proceeding through cationic intermediates to be conducted in a highly enantioselective manner, and thus stereochemical control could be effectively induced by the chiral counteranion. This strategy has been defined as asymmetric counterion-directed catalysis (ACDC) [25]. 

While asymmetric counteranion-directed catalysis (ACDC) has been estab-hshed as a powerful strategy in iminium catalysis, enamine-based asymmetric counteranion-directed catalysis has not yet been developed. Recently, Lu et al. [32] demonstrated that the combination of a cinchona alkaloid-derived primary amine and chiral camphorsuhnnic acid (CSA) results in an effective ion-pair catalyst for the directed asymmetric amination of a-branched aldehydes through enamine activation (Scheme 43.21). 

Asymmetric hydride reduction using Hantzsch ester has recently been extensively explored in organocatalysis using iminium-based catalysts or Brpnsted acid catalysts [72a-c], As an advance to their asymmetric conterion-directed catalysis (ACDC), List and coworkers found that the combination of simple primary amino acids such as L-valine with a chiral phosphoric acid led to an effective primary aminocatalyst for asymmetric transfer hydrogenation of a,P-unsaturated ketones (Scheme 5.43) [72d]. The catalysis could be applied to a range of substrates with good yields and excellent enantioselectivity. 

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