Tanguy Saget

Chiral organic molecules are essential to our society so the development of efficient and selective methods to build such molecules is highly important. In this regard, enantioselective catalysis represents a powerful and industrially-relevant tool to access enantioenriched chiral compounds without using stoichiometric chiral reagents. Despite continuous advances in this field, the enantioselective conversion of simple chemicals into relevant chiral molecules remains a formidable challenge. Indeed, contemporary enantioselective methods still routinely require elaborated or pre-activated starting materials as the use of readily available but unactivated substrates often leads to poor reactivity and/or low selectivities. In this lecture, I will present the development of catalytic systems enabling streamlined access to complex and valuable chiral molecules starting from simple and unactivated substrates.

[1] T. Saget, S. J. Lemouzy, N. Cramer, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 2238.