Final Report Summary - DECCAPAC (Design and Exploitation of C-C and C-H Activation Pathways in Asymmetric Catalysis) Synthesizing organic molecules in high purity with designed properties is critical pharmaceutical applications and for material- and polymer sciences including the efficient production of enantiopure compounds and the compliance with ecological concerns and sustainability. An appealing strategy towards these goals is the direct functionalization of carbon-hydrogen and carbon-carbon bonds. This approach unlocks a broad range of starting materials and streamlines synthetic routes. Despite recent progress in the activations of these “inert” bonds, poor reactivities and harsh conditions hampered practical applications and especially enantioselective activations remain a tough challenge. More detailed, we have devised tunable chiral phosphorous ligands acting synergistically with carboxylates in palladium-catalyzed carbon-hydron bond activation. These catalyst systems were successfully used to rapidly assemble several pharmaceutically relevant molecular scaffolds. Furthermore, we have successfully developed chiral cyclopentadienyl ligand architectures which enable previously unknown enantioselective carbon-hydrogen bond functionalizations. Both archetypical catalyst families have been tested for their application potential and robustness. We have found a broad variety of substrates types that can be functionalized efficiently. A wide range of high-value building blocks of significant versatility can now be accessed in a streamlined, more efficient and sustainable manner.
