Chiral catalysts organocatalysis

Alternatively, the iminium-activation strategy has also been apphed to the Mukaiyama-Michael reaction, which involves the use of silyl enol ethers as nucleophiles. In this context, imidazolidinone 50a was identified as an excellent chiral catalyst for the enantioselective conjugate addition of silyloxyfuran to a,p-unsaturated aldehydes, providing a direct and efficient route to the y-butenolide architecture (Scheme 3.15). This is a clear example of the chemical complementarity between organocatalysis and transition-metal catalysis, with the latter usually furnishing the 1,2-addition product (Mukaiyama aldol) while the former proceeds via 1,4-addition when ambident electrophiles such as a,p-unsaturated aldehydes are employed. This reaction needed the incorporation of 2,4-dinitrobenzoic acid (DNBA) as a Bronsted acid co-catalyst assisting the formation of the intermediate iminium ion, and also two equivalents of water had to be included as additive for the reaction to proceed to completion, which... 

Current interest in organocatalysis is focused on asymmetric catalysis with chiral catalysts, or enantioselective organocatalysis (Fig. 2.42). In the asymmetric aldol reaction (Fig. 2.42), naturally occurring chiral proline is the chiral catalyst giving 93% enantiomeric excess when just 3% proline is added to an achiral triketone. 

An important area of organocatalysis that was also initiated in the early 1990s has been the realm of Lewis base catalysis. ° On the basis of the noninmitive activation principle of silyl bonding rehybridization, Denmark and Iseki introduced chiral and DMF variants as effective catalysts for enantioselec-... 

Finally in Chapters 11-13, some of the more recent discoveries that have led to a renaissance in the field of organocatalysis are described. Included in this section are the development of chiral Brdnsted acids and Lewis acidic metals bearing the conjugate base of the Bronsted acids as the ligands and the chiral bifunctional acid-base catalysts. 

Keywords Asymmetric organocatalysis Bifunctional catalyst Brpnsted base Chiral scaffold Cinchona akaloid Cyclohexane-diamine Guanidine... 

The preparation of stereochemically-enriched compounds by asymmetric acyl transfer using chiral nucleophihc catalysts has received significant attention in recent years [1-8]. One of the most synthetically useful and probably the most studied acyl transfer reaction to date is the kinetic resolution (KR) of ec-alcohols, a class of molecules which are important building blocks for the synthesis of a plethora of natural products, chiral ligands, auxiliaries, catalysts and biologically active compounds. This research area has been in the forefront of the contemporary organocatalysis renaissance [9, 10], and has resulted in a number of attractive and practical KR protocols. 

Specific Brpnsted acid catalysis is a popular field within the domain of asymmetric organocatalysis. Since the introduction of stronger chiral Brpnsted acids as powerful catalysts for enantioselective synthesis in 2004, numerous asymmetric Brpnsted acid-catalyzed transformations have been developed. 

One of the early examples for organocatalysis is the asymmetric Weitz-Scheffer epoxidation of electron-deficient olefins, which can be effected either by organic chiral phase transfer catalysts (PTC) under biphasic conditions or by polyamino acids. This reaction has gained considerable attention and is of great synthetic use. 

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