Chiral organocatalysis

Even if organocatalysis is a common activation process in biological transformations, this concept has only recently been developed for chemical applications. During the last decade, achiral ureas and thioureas have been used in allylation reactions [146], the Bayhs-Hillman reaction [147] and the Claisen rearrangement [148]. Chiral organocatalysis can be achieved with optically active ureas and thioureas for asymmetric C - C bond-forming reactions such as the Strecker reaction (Sect. 5.1), Mannich reactions (Sect. 5.2), phosphorylation reactions (Sect. 5.3), Michael reactions (Sect. 5.4) and Diels-Alder cyclisations (Sect. 5.6). Finally, deprotonated chiral thioureas were used as chiral bases (Sect. 5.7). 

Chiral organocatalysis is a really attractive tool for performing effective reactions while avoiding the use of metals. Normally, organocatalysts contaminate less and are less toxic than organometallic catalysts because they do not include metals within their structures, which is beneficial for industries that... 

Enzyme-mediated oxidation reactions offer highly diverse options for the modification of existing functional groups as well as for the introduction of novel function in chiral catalysis. Biooxidations often enable us to obtain complementary solutions to metal-assisted transformations and organocatalysis and are considered one of the important strategies of green chemistry . 

Major advances in the application of NHCs in organocatalysis have been achieved, and this arena has become a focus of considerable research. The use of chiral NHCs has allowed access to highly enantioselective organocatalytic transformations and the breadth and depth of reactivity that can be accessed is ever expanding. 

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. 

Hydrogen would be the simplest center element. Indeed, chiral Brpnsted acids have emerged as a new class of organocatalysis over the last few years [3-13]. The field of asymmetric Brpnsted acid catalysis can be divided into general acid catalysis and specific acid catalysis. A general acid activates its substrate (1) via hydrogen bonding (Scheme 2, a), whereas the substrate (1) of a specific acid is activated via protonation (Scheme 2, b). 

Chiral Br0nsted Acids for Asymmetric Organocatalysis 2.3.8 Strecker Reactions... 

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