Editor's Summary
25 August 2005
Control your excitement
Photoinduced electron transfer uses light absorption to generate molecules in excited electronic states susceptible to accepting or donating electrons. This can be a good way of synthesizing organic chemicals, but the involvement of excited states makes it hard to control the nature of the reaction products. By using an appropriately chosen organocatalyst, Bauer et al. show how such a reaction can be made to proceed in an enantioselective manner, yielding the desired product at high chiral purity.
News and Views: Synthetic chemistry: Light on chirality
Reactions that produce only one of two mirror-image forms of a molecule are a hot topic in organic synthesis. A light-driven catalyst provides good results, and the technique could be generally applicable.
Yoshihisa Inoue
doi:10.1038/4361099a
Letter: Catalytic enantioselective reactions driven by photoinduced electron transfer
Andreas Bauer, Felix Westkämper, Stefan Grimme and Thorsten Bach
doi:10.1038/nature03955
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (141K) | Supplementary information