Novel Chiral Nano-Sized Supports for Asymmetric Heterogeneous Catalysis

Over the past few decades, asymmetric transition metal catalysis has become the domain of very intense research activity and greatly expanded the scope of catalytic asymmetric transformations that can be performed with high efficiency. Consequently, large libraries consisting of hundreds of (expensive) chiral ligands and thousands of the corresponding transition metal complexes have been developed for various homogeneously catalyzed organic transformations. However, despite this spectacular progress, only a limited number of asymmetric catalysts found industrial large-scale applications due to the high cost of the metal and of the chiral ligands (both are unrecoverable).

Over the past few decades, a number of strategies have been developed for heterogenizing homogenous (molecular) transition metal catalysts. Roughly, stationary supports may be organic macromolecules (e.g. linear/cross-linked polymers or dendrimers), inorganic or hybrid materials (e.g. graphite, activated carbon, amorphous silica/alumina, zeolites, mesoporous silica/alumina, periodic mesoporous organosilica, metal organic frameworks, etc.). Noteworthy, in all these cases, enantioselection originates from the chiral pocket provided by the chiral ligand, while supports are generally inert and play no active role over the course of the catalytic cycle.

Our group is interested to design efficient heterogeneous asymmetric catalytic systems based on robust achiral transition metal particles incorporated into novel chiral non-racemic porous network and, thus, to establish a new approach to the development of practical heterogeneous asymmetric catalysts for industrial and laboratory applications.