Creation of chiral materials: Yesterday, today and tomorrow

Abstract

Chirality is a fundamental characteristic of nature and pervades the world. The chiral materials closely related to our life, especially our health. The thalidomide tragedy, lessons for drug safety and regulation from the late 1950s and the early 1960s, indicated the importance of creating chiral materials in optically pure form. Pasteur was the first to conduct chiral resolution for the preparation of optically active molecules before 1860. Since then, scientists including chemists started to search methods for creating chiral materials like enzyme. After more than one hundred years of efforts, chemists find that the synthetic chiral catalysts (also known as artificial enzymes) catalyzed asymmetric reactions is the door to creating chiral materials. From 1970 to 2001, many efficient and selective catalytic asymmetric reactions and methods have been developed for creating chiral materials. In particular, the successes of catalytic asymmetric hydrogenations and catalytic asymmetric epoxidations and their applications in industrial preparation of chiral drugs enable this research field to won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2001. To date, tremendous amount of chiral materials such as chiral pharmaceuticals, chiral agrochemicals, chiral liquid crystals were created in a high selective and efficient manner. We now can create chiral materials like enzymes by using asymmetric catalysis with artificial enzymes as catalysts. The Chinese chemists also made great contributions for creating chiral materials, especially in the past two decades. They developed a series of highly efficient chiral ligands and catalysts including the magical chiral spiro ligands and catalysts, the privileged chiral N , N ￠-dioxides, as well as many original organocatalysts. These catalysts are highly efficient for a wide range of reactions involving asymmetric hydrogenation, asymmetric carbon-carbon bond formations, and asymmetric carbon-heteroatom bond formations, providing chiral alcohols, chiral amines, chiral acids, etc. Many new asymmetric catalytic reactions, new concepts, new strategies were also developed by Chinese chemists, which afforded new methodologies for creating chiral materials. From this century, in order to meet the new demand of mankind on the chiral materials, scientists begin to develop green and sustainable methods for the accurate, powerful and environment-friendly creation of chiral materials. In addition, the creation of chiral materials has been in depth combined with life sciences, environmental sciences, materials science and information sciences, etc. This review focus on the main line of the discovery and development of asymmetric catalysis, in combination with the development in China, to give a brief overview for the journey of creation of chiral materials.