Asymmetric catalysis is one of the most efficient ways to prepare optically pure organic compounds. Chiral amino alcohols represent an important type of highly versatile chiral building blocks for organic synthesis, especially for access to bioactive natural products and pharmaceutical agents. Hitherto, BOX-type and salen-type as two privileged classes of C2-symmetric ligands have been widely used in a great number of asymmetric metal-catalyzed reactions. Since the structure and electronic property of C1-symmetric ligands are more feasible to adjust, Our group focuses on design and synthesis of chiral N-ligands from natural amino acids and camphor, and their catalyzed asymmetric aldol reactions, nitroaldol reactions and Michael additions with aldehydes or enals to prepare chiral drug intermediates, involving fluorine-containing compounds.

On the other hand, the smallest strained cyclopropenes are of particular interest for their unique structure and electronic properties. These three-membered carbocycles are extremely important versatile building blocks in organic chemistry. Recently, our lab developed one efficient method to get new type of reactive 2-acyl-cyclopropenecarboxylic esters. Now, we focuses on synthetic methodology for constructing bioactive carbocyclic and heterocyclic compounds starting from these novel reactive reagents.

Link: http://orglab.chem.hust.edu.cn/