Asymmetric catalysis in complex target synthesis

This article describes three distinct strategies by which stereochemically complex molecules are synthesized and the ways asymmetric catalysis can impact on all three. The development of general methods to prepare synthetically useful building blocks leads to an expanded chiral pool of potential starting materials for asymmetric synthesis. The possibility of discovering new reactions to access new types of building blocks is particularly attractive and serves to help define the frontiers of the field. Asymmetric catalysis can also be applied to diastereoselective synthesis such that the stereochemistry of the catalyst, and not that of the substrate, determines the relative configuration of the product. Finally, in reactions where multiple stereocenters are generated simultaneously or in tandem, catalyst and substrate control can operate in a complementary manner to achieve one of many possible stereochemical outcomes selectively.