Manganese and copper-catalyzed asymmetric additions to Michael acceptors

Abstract

Catalysis plays a major role in chemical industry and academic labs. The most known essential industrial process that involve catalysis are the hydrogenation of oils, production of ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen (Haber-Bosh process) and the automobile exhaust catalysts among others. Although much progress has been done with this complex technology, catalysis has more to offer and for the foreseeing future different challenges must be taken into account when new catalytic processes are designed. Two of them are the shortage of precious metals and the cost of the often chiral phosphine ligands on which many of the best catalytic systems are based on. The aim of this thesis was to develop sustainable catalytic asymmetric methodologies for the synthesis of chiral phosphine ligands, as they are the most commonly used ligands in homogeneous catalysis. This challenge was approached from two different directions: (i) by replacing the noble metals used for this transformation with both cheap and readily available alternatives, and (ii) by developing cost-efficient ways to access chiral phosphine ligands.