Ruthenium complexes of chiral tridentate ligands: a new class of catalyst for asymmetric ketone and imine hydrogenation.

催化剂可以极大地加快化学反应的速度，而不会使催化剂本身在反应中耗尽。均相催化剂在工业化学合成中发挥着越来越重要的作用。对化学过程对环境危害较小的要求增加了反应的重要性，这些反应利用微量催化剂来促进两种化学物质之间清洁、高效的反应，而这两种化学物质通常不会以可测量的速度相互反应。其中最重要的例子之一是一类被称为羰基化合物的化学物质的催化还原为醇。酒精是制造药物、香料、香水和塑料的最重要的成分之一。有许多方法可以实现这种转变，但大多数都会产生废物。从经济和生态的角度来看，更可取的是使用催化剂和分子氢来完成这一任务，因为不会产生废物。对于某些类别的羰基化合物，这已经实现了。然而，有许多类别是不能有效地‘氢化’使用当前技术的催化剂状态。本研究项目旨在开发一种新型的加氢催化剂，该催化剂是以含磷和氮原子的(光学纯)配体修饰的Ru金属化合物为基础的。新的催化剂将有效地将酮加氢成醇。一些醇以两种镜像结构(光学异构体)的形式存在，就像你的左手和右手一样，尽管具有相同的化学成分，但每个镜像具有非常不同的生物学特性。因此，有大量的研究工作旨在生产光学活性醇作为制药工业的单一光学异构体。由于上述环境问题，用于制备单一光学异构醇的方法使用清洁的催化化学是可取的。该项目旨在开发能够清洁地将目前难以还原的羰基化合物氢化的催化剂，并以一种产生单一光学异构体的方式做到这一点。这项研究可能会导致首次高效地制备新的醇类产品，并可能在未来走向商业应用。

A catalyst allows the rate of a chemical reaction to be accelerated enormously, without the catalyst itself being used up in the reaction. Homogeneous catalysts play an ever-increasing role in industrial chemical synthesis. The demand for chemical processes to be less harmful to the environment has increased the importance of reactions that utilise tiny amounts of catalyst to promote clean, efficient reactions between two chemicals that do not normally react with each other at a measurable rate. One of the most important examples is catalytic reduction of a class of chemicals called carbonyl compounds to alcohols. Alcohols are one of the most important ingredients for drugs, flavours, fragrances and plastics. There are a number of methods to do this transformation, but most generate waste. More desirable from an economic and ecological point of view is to use a catalyst and molecular hydrogen to accomplish this task, since no waste would be formed. This has been achieved for certain classes of carbonyl compound. However, there are many classes that are not efficiently 'hydrogenated' using the current state of the art catalysts. This research project aims to develop a new type of hydrogenation catalyst that is based on ruthenium metal compounds modified with an (optically pure) ligand containing phosphorus and nitrogen atoms. The new catalysts will efficiently hydrogenate ketones to alcohols. Some alcohols exist as two mirror image structures (optical isomers),related like your left and right hands, and despite sharing the same chemical composition, each mirror image has very different biological properties. There is therefore a massive research effort aimed at producing optically active alcohols as single optical isomers for the pharmaceutical industry. It is desirable that the methods used to prepare the single optical isomer alcohols use clean catalytic chemistry due to the environmental issues raised above. This project aims to develop catalysts that can cleanly hydrogenate carbonyl compounds that are currently difficult to reduce, and to do so in a way that makes a single optical isomer. The research could lead to new alcohols products being efficiently prepared for the first time, and could lead onto commercial applications in the future.