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

催化剂可以大大加快化学反应的速度，而不会在反应中耗尽催化剂本身。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更小的要求增加了利用微量催化剂促进两种通常不能以可测量的速率相互反应的化学物质之间的清洁，有效反应的重要性。最重要的例子之一是催化还原一类被称为羰基化合物的化学物质为醇。酒精是药物、香料、香水和塑料的最重要成分之一。有许多方法可以进行这种转化，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氢分子来完成这项任务，因为不会产生废物。对于某些种类的羰基化合物已经实现了这一点。然而，有许多类别不能有效地“氢化”使用目前最先进的催化剂。本研究项目旨在开发一种新型的加氢催化剂，该催化剂是基于钌金属化合物，用含磷和氮原子的（光学纯）配体修饰。这种新型催化剂能有效地将酮氢化成醇。有些醇以两种镜像结构（光学异构体）存在，就像你的左手和右手一样，尽管化学成分相同，但每一种镜像都有非常不同的生物特性。因此，有大量的研究工作旨在为制药工业生产光学活性醇作为单一光学异构体。由于上述环境问题，希望制备单光学异构体醇的方法使用清洁的催化化学。该项目旨在开发催化剂，使目前难以还原的羰基化合物能够干净地氢化，并以一种制造单一光学异构体的方式实现这一目标。这项研究可能会导致新的酒精产品第一次被有效地制备出来，并可能导致未来的商业应用。

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.