Abstract:

Development of efficient catalytic asymmetric reactions is the most challenging task in current synthetic chemistry; much effort has been devoted to create the chiral metal complexes of asymmetric catalysis. In the last two decades' many brand-new ligands had been synthesized and their combination with various metal ions has been applied in asymmetric catalysis. However, most ligands have only narrow applications and their use is limited to some reactions. Exceptionally, a few ligands and their metal complexes such as binaphthol, semicollin,and binap show wide applicability. Chiral salen ligand is one of such ligands and their metal complexes are now used as the catalysts for a variety of asymmetric reactions such as epoxidation^[1], aziridination^[2], cyclopropanation^[3], Diels-Alder reaction^[4], asymmetric transfer hydrogenation of aromatic ketones^[5] and kinetic resolution of racemic epoxides^[6] and so on.