Chiral Ligands for Rhodium-Catalyzed Asymmetric Hydroformylation: A Personal Account

Abstract

Asymmetric hydroformylation represents one of the most efficient routes for the preparation of chiral aldehydes from alkenes in the presence of syngas in a perfect atom-economic way. During the past few decades, a variety of chiral ligands have been developed for the asymmetric hydroformylation. However, only a few ligands exhibit good performance in terms of the regio- and enantioselectivities. Additionally, for the chiral ligands developed up to now, only limited substrates were tolerated and no examples have led to the application of the asymmetric hydroformylation reaction on a commercial scale due to several technical challenges. This account provides a brief introduction of the current efficient chiral ligands for asymmetric hydroformylation and the ongoing efforts we have made in this field.

Keywords: P ligands; hydroformylation; hydrogenation; ligand design; asymmetric catalysis.