Chiral compounds recent innovations

The use of palladium(II) 7i-allyl complexes in organic chemistry has a rich history. These complexes were the first examples of a C-M bond to be used as an electrophile [1-3]. At the dawn of the era of asymmetric catalysis, the use of chiral phosphines in palladium-catalyzed allylic alkylation reactions provided key early successes in asymmetric C-C bond formation that were an important validation of the usefulness of the field [4]. No researchers were more important to these innovations than Prof. B.M. Trost and Prof. J. Tsuji [5-10]. While most of the early discoveries in this field provided access to tertiary (3°) stereocenters formed on a prochiral electrophile [Eq. (1)] (Scheme 1), our interest focused on making quaternary (4°) stereocenters on prochiral enolates [Eq. (2)]. Recently, we have described decarboxylative asymmetric allylic alkylation reactions involving prochiral enolates that provide access to enantioenriched ot-quatemary carbonyl compounds [11-13]. We found that a range of substrates (e.g., allyl enol carbonates,... 

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