Enantioselective Hydrophosphination of Alkene and Alkyne for Exploration of New Phosphine Ligand in Asymmetric Catalysis

The world is full of chirality. Chiral molecules play an enormous role in areas ranging from medicine to material science. Today, many of these useful chiral molecules are made by organic synthesis, more specifically, asymmetric synthesis. Among various asymmetric synthetic methods, asymmetric catalysis is most attractive. Numerous new opportunities and challenges emerge during the development of previously underdeveloped catalytic asymmetric reactions.

Asymmetric catalysis is a very broad and exciting field. The development of efficient chiral catalysts/ligands has played an important role in the field of asymmetric catalysis. In spite of considerable interest in the design and synthesis of chiral ligand systems, chiral phosphines are keeping their prestigious role as the most powerful and frequently employed class of ligands in transition metal-catalyzed asymmetric reactions. With the exceptionally high demand of chiral phosphine ligand, it thus reflectively translates the particular needs to establishment of more efficient methods for achieving these optically pure phosphine compounds.

Transition metal-catalyzed asymmetric hydrophosphination is the most efficient and direct pathway for the synthesis of phosphine compounds. Nevertheless, recent discoveries in the field demonstrated unequivocally that the regio- and stereocontrol of these catalytic hydrophosphinations remained highly challenging and were only sporadically addressed and less explored. Thus, the investigation of new and efficient catalyst system for attaining more effective transition metal-catalyzed asymmetric hydrophosphinations is of significant demand. The easy accessibility and modular structure of these phosphine products afforded by asymmetric hydrophosphination will offer us excellent tools toward the study of more challenging and unprecedented reactions in asymmetric catalysis.