A highly enantioselective asymmetric Darzens reaction catalysed by proline based efficient organocatalysts for the synthesis of di- and tri-substituted epoxides

A new class of easily available and readily tunable proline based chiral organocatalysts was found to efficiently catalyse an unprecedented highly enantioselective asymmetric Darzens reaction of α-chloroketones and substituted α-chloroketones with various aldehydes, which directly produces optically active di- and tri-substituted chiral epoxides with higher product yields (up to 97%) and excellent ee's (up to 99%) under mild reaction conditions.

Non-redox-metal-catalyzed redox reactions: zinc catalysts

The advantages of zinc catalysts, such as their low toxicity, low cost, and environmentally benignity, are encouraging organic chemists to explore their applications in organic synthesis. As a non-redox metal, zinc catalysts have been investigated in redox reactions over the past few decades. Because of the importance of redox reactions, the interest in zinc catalysts, and the fact that no review on zinc-catalyzed redox reactions has been published, herein, I have collected and summarized the main contributions in this area. This review is divided into two parts: reduction reactions and oxidation reactions.

Multinuclear Cu-catalysts based on SPINOL-PHOS in asymmetric conjugate addition of organozinc reagents

Multinuclear Cu/Zn complex-catalyzed efficient asymmetric conjugate addition of organozinc reagents to acyclic and cyclic enones has been developed in the presence of a wide variety of regioisomeric chiral diols bearing phosphorus moieties as ligands. The regioisomeric SPINOL-PHOS ligands based on a SPINOL architecture showed an unexpected inversion of stereoselectivity.

Nonlinear effects in asymmetric catalysis

There is a need for the preparation of enantiomerically pure compounds for various applications. An efficient approach to achieve this goal is asymmetric catalysis. The chiral catalyst is usually prepared from a chiral auxiliary, which itself is derived from a natural product or by resolution of a racemic precursor. The use of non-enantiopure chiral auxiliaries in asymmetric catalysis seems unattractive to preparative chemists, since the anticipated enantiomeric excess (ee) of the reaction product should be proportional to the ee value of the chiral auxiliary (linearity). In fact, some deviation from linearity may arise. Such nonlinear effects can be rich in mechanistic information and can be synthetically useful (asymmetric amplification). This Review documents the advances made during the last decade in the use of nonlinear effects in the area of organometallic and organic catalysis.