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An exciting tool for asymmetric synthesis

A catalytic process driven by visible light converts a mixture of mirror-image isomers of compounds called allenes to a single mirror-image isomer — opening up avenues of research for synthetic chemistry.
  1. Cheng Yang

    1. Cheng Yang is in the Key Laboratory of Green Chemistry & Technology of Ministry of Education, College of Chemistry, State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy, and Healthy Food Evaluation Research Center, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China.

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  2. Yoshihisa Inoue

    1. Yoshihisa Inoue is in the Department of Applied Chemistry, Osaka University, Suita 565-0861, Japan.

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Molecules can exhibit a handedness, known as chirality. This is crucial to many aspects of chemistry and biology because the mirror-image isomers (enantiomers) of a chiral molecule can have distinctly different properties, reactivities and chemical or biological functions. For example, nature often uses just one enantiomer of a family of molecules as building blocks to construct sophisticated structures such as DNA, and in other biological processes. The development of methods for synthesizing chiral molecules asymmetrically — predominantly as a single enantiomer — is therefore one of the most important goals in organic and medicinal chemistry. In a paper in Nature, Hölzl-Hobmeier et al.1 report an approach that can also be used to achieve a seemingly impossible task in asymmetric synthesis: the light-induced, catalytic and apparently irreversible formation of single enantiomers of molecules called allenes from a one-to-one mixture of enantiomers (a racemic mixture).

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Nature 564, 197-199 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07625-1

References

  1. Hölzl-Hobmeier, A. et al. Nature 564, 240-243 (2018).

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