The Asymmetric Hydrogenation Of α-Hydroxy Ketones

Chirality is closely related to our lives. It involves in life, pharmaceutical, food, fragnance, pesticides, dyes, cosmetics and other areas. The synthesis of chiral compounds is one of the most important area in organic synthesis, and numerous publications seen on decent journals every year. Asymmetric catalysis, as one of the means to synthesize optically pure compounds, is the simplest, most promising, and yet the most challenging way.The chiral vicinal diols play an important role in organic synthesis. They are ideal chiral synthesis building blocks and can be used for synthesis of a variety of chiral compounds and drugs possessing a chiral vicinal diol moiety.In this thesis, we made the chiral vicinal diols by the asymmetric hydrogenation of the correspondingα-hydroxy ketones. A series of catalysts were synthesized by using ligand SunPhos and Ru-complexs. These SunPhos-Ru complexes have been employed as catalysts for the asymmetric hydrogenation ofα-hydroxy ketones. Several chiral vicinal diol were synthesized under our optimized reaction conditions. The relationship between substrate structure and catalytic activity and stereoselectivity was also studied.