Modular Hydroxyamide and Thioamide Pyranoside-Based Ligand Library from the Sugar Pool: New Class of Ligands for Asymmetric Transfer Hydrogenation of Ketones

A large library of pyranoside-based hydroxyamide and thioamide ligands has been synthesized for asymmetric transfer hydrogenation in an attempt to expand the scope of the substrates to cover a broader range of challenging heteroaromatic and aryl/fluoroalkyl ketones. These ligands have the advantage that they are prepared from commercial D-glucose, D-glucosamine and a-amino acids, inexpensive natural chiral feedstocks. By carefully selecting the ligand components (substituents/configurations at the amide/thioamide moiety, the position of amide/thioamide group and the configuration at C-2), we found that pyranoside-based thioamide ligands provided excellent enantioselectivities (in the best cases, ees of >99% were achieved) in a broad range of ketones, including the less studied heteroaromatics and challenging aryl/fluoroalkyls. Note that both enantiomers of the reduction products can be obtained with excellent enantioselectivities by simply changing the absolute configuration of the thioamide substituent.