Outside help for a carbene catalyst

Organic Chemistry Metal catalysis is sometimes enhanced by secondary interactions with components that are not directly coordinated to the metal. Dhayalan et al. have explored this concept with metal-free organocatalysis. Specifically, they found that dynamically tethering a boronic acid to the periphery of an N-heterocyclic carbene catalyst raised enantioselectivity of a benzoin condensation. Furthermore, by applying a decision tree analysis correlating selectivity with parameters such as dipole moment and torsion angle, they efficiently optimized the boronic acid structure for gram-scale reactions. Nat. Chem. 11 , 543 (2019).