Sara Coles is a guest web-writer for RSC Advances. She currently works for Johnson Matthey in Royston, UK.
Jiahong Li and colleagues at Chengdu Institute of Organic Chemistry in China have prepared water-soluble ligands to allow transition metal catalysed asymmetric transfer hydrogenation (ATH) of aromatic ketones, especially aromatic ketones with a bromine group in the alpha position. They produced the expected alcholos with ees up to 96% and the catalyst could be reused at least 21 times.
The reactions were carried out in the presence of cationic surfactant CTAB (cetyltrimethylammonium bromide). Of the three catalytic metals tested, ruthenium, iridium and rhodium, they report that the best results were obtained using ruthenium.
Products synthesised using the novel catalyst system included key pharmaceutical intermediates for anti-asthma drugs, terbutaline and salbutamol.
Read more about the experimental work in RSC Advances:
Surfactant-accelerated asymmetric transfer hydrogenation with recyclable water-soluble catalyst in aqueous media, Jiahong Li, Xuefeng Li, Yaping Ma, Jiashou Wu, Fei Wang, Jing Xiang, Jin Zhu, Qiwei Wang and Jingen Deng, RSC Adv., 2013, 3, 1825
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