N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHC) are a class of persistent carbenes stabilized by adjacent heteroatoms that are part of a heterocycle. They play a central role in multiple enzymatic biosynthetic reactions that involve thiamine diphosphate. Inspired by this biocatalysis machinery, NHCs have emerged as one of the most versatile classes of organocatalysts for chemical synthesis. However, asymmetric catalysis via a non-covalent interaction mechanism has not been previously established for chiral NHCs. Professor Yong Huang’s group at PKU Shenzhen recently accomplished a NHC catalyzed highly enantioselective process that uses weak hydrogen bonds to relay asymmetric bias. This work has been published in Nature Communications (2014, 5: 3437; DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4437). This work was solely carried out at PKUSZ, with doctoral candidate Mr. Jiean Chen as the first author.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140306/ncomms4437/full/ncomms4437.html
