Chiral compounds biocatalytic synthesis methods

Efficient and general methods for the synthesis of chiral phosphine oxides and related compounds are a permanent subject for research of organic chemists. Therefore, the application of biocatalytic methods for the preparation of optically active P-chiral compounds has attracted great attention and a number of successful syntheses were described [172-178]. 

As with another class of compounds, the scale of synthesis and time required at the research stage before product can be made influence which method is finally used. At small scale, a plethora of methods exist to prepare amino acids, in addition to isolation of the common ones from natural sources. The majority of these small-scale reactions rely on the use of a chiral auxiliary or template. At larger scale, asymmetric hydrogenation and biocatalytic processes come into their own. For the amino acids approaching commodity chemical scales, biological approaches, either as biocatalytic or total fermentation, provide the most cost-efficient processes. 

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