The Diarylprolinol Silyl Ether System: A General Organocatalyst

The past few decades have witnessed some of the most important and revolutionizing advances in the field of asymmetric catalysis. Chemists no longer rely solely on natural sources as the starting point of their synthetic strategy, as in chiral pool or auxiliary-based synthesis. Instead, naturally occurring chiral motifs are selected and, either unchanged or after modification, used in substoichiometric amounts as chiral catalysts or ligands. In this way, they effectively transfer their chirality to prochiral substrates, thereby rapidly amplifying and diversifying the arsenal of useful chiral building blocks available to the synthetic community. A long-standing goal in the pursuit of new catalytic systems is…