Selectivity Lewis base-promoted catalysis

The addition of an enolsilane to an aldehyde, commonly referred to as the Mukaiyama aldol reaction, is readily promoted by Lewis acids and has been the subject of intense interest in the field of chiral Lewis acid catalysis. Copper-based Lewis acids have been applied to this process in an attempt to generate polyacetate and polypropionate synthons for natural product synthesis. Although the considerable Lewis acidity of many of these complexes is more than sufficient to activate a broad range of aldehydes, high selectivities have been observed predominantly with substrates capable of two-point coordination to the metal. Of these, benzy-loxyacetaldehyde and pyruvate esters have been most successful. 

A recent example has been described by Brown et al. who have studied the KR of p-nitrophenyl esters of the d- and i-N-tert-butoxycarbonyl derivatives of glutamine and phenylalanine with ethanol or methanol promoted by chiral lanthanide complexes, providing enantioselectivities of up to 99% ee [302]. On the other hand, an enantioselective hydrolysis of phenylalanine derivatives was reported in 1986, providing a perfect enantiomer discrimination (s> 1000), as a result of catalysis with a tripeptide [303]. In 2007, Maruoka et al. reported the KR of differently a,a-disubstituted a-siloxy aldehydes based on an asymmetric rearrangement into the corresponding chiral acyloins using axially chiral organoaluminium Lewis acids, which provided selectivity factors of up to 39.5... 

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