Recent Advances in the Development of Chiral Gold Complexes for Catalytic Asymmetric Catalysis

Abstract

Asymmetric gold catalysis has been rapidly developed in the past ten years. Breakthroughs have been made by rational design and meticulous selection of chiral ligands. This review summarizes newly developed gold-catalyzed enantioselective organic transformations and recent progress in ligand design (since 2016), organized according to different types of chiral ligands, including bisphosphine ligands, monophosphine ligands, phosphite-derived ligands, and N-heterocyclic carbene ligands for asymmetric gold(I) catalysis as well as heterocyclic carbene ligands and oxazoline ligands for asymmetric gold(III) catalysis.

Keywords: asymmetric catalysis; enantioselectivity; gold; homogeneous catalysis; ligand design.