Recent Developments in Asymmetric Organic Synthesis: Principles and Examples

Abstract

Chirality is a fundamental symmetry property in three and other dimensions. A molecule is said to be chiral if it cannot be superimposed upon its mirror image. Putting on one’s shoes or shaking hands confronts us with chirality. Although there is no obvious relationship between macroscopic chirality and chirality at the molecular level, it is accepted that homochirality (i.e., molecules with the same chirality; e.g., L-α-amino acids, D-glucose, D-arabinose) is one of the most fundamental aspects of life on Earth. Parity violation discovered in the weak nuclear force (the fourth type of fundamental force, next to gravity, electromagnetism and the strong nuclear force) led to the experimental observation than the β-particles emitted from radioactive nuclei have an intrinsic asymmetry: left-handed (L)-electrons are preferentially formed relative to right-handed (R)-electrons. The major consequence of this finding is that chirality exists at the level of elemental particles, making the two enantiomers of a chiral molecule not to have exactly the same energy (Ulbricht 1981; Mason 1989; Feringa and van Delden 1999).KeywordsEnantiomeric ExcessAsymmetric SynthesisKinetic ResolutionSupercritical Fluid ChromatographyAldol ReactionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.