Invited Lecture – Nicolai Cramer

Access to robust tailored chiral ligands is of critical importance for advances in homogenous enantioselective catalysis. The design and development of novel ligand libraries is often a time-consuming and often tedious trial-and-error process. We seek to identify new privileged chiral elements / scaffolds which could be rapidly adapted and used for a broad range of reaction types. Pairing the structural data of the chiral micro environments of the catalytically active sites with computational selectivity predictions sharpens the focus on the preparation of “high potential” catalyst candidates for the library. The presentation will cover recent examples of my laboratory.

In this respect, diimines are a versatile platform, easily accessed by simple condensation from dicarbonyls and bulky chiral primary amines. They can be rapidly elaborated into a variety of enabling chiral ligands and catalysts serving as diimines for iron-catalyzed enantioselective transformations, as NHCs in nickel catalyzed C-H bond functionalizations and as DAPs for main-group catalysis.