Vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) spectroscopy is one of the most powerful techniques for the determination of absolute configurations (AC), as it does not require any specific UV/vis chromophores, no chemical derivatization, and no growth of suitable crystals. In the past decade, it has become increasingly recognized by chemists from various fields of synthetic chemistry such as total synthesis and drug discovery as well as from developers of asymmetric catalysts. This perspective article gives an overview about the most important experimental aspects of a VCD-based AC determination and explains the theoretical analysis. The comparison of experimental and computational spectra that leads to the final conclusion about the AC of the target molecules is described. In addition, the review summarizes unique VCD studies carried out in the period 2008−2018 that focus on the determination of unknown ACs of new compounds, which were obtained in its enantiopure form either through direct asymmetric synthesis or chiral chromatography.

Propylene oxide (PO) is the ideal candidate to benchmark both new experimental and theoretical approaches. Herein it is used to demonstrate the feasibility of measurements of VCD spectra in liquid rare gases (CryoVCD) and to test recent theoretical developments in the prediction of anharmonic IR and VCD spectra.

The analysis of vibrational circular dichroism and infrared spectra typically requires the prediction of spectra on the density functional theory level. In particular for absolute configuration determinations, for which the comparison between experiment and theory is often supported by similarity analysis algorithms, it is important that frequencies, relative band intensities and VCD signs are predicted correctly. Due to the poor prediction of harmonic frequencies, carbon-fluorine stretching vibrations are often strongly misplaced by common hybrid functionals such as B3LYP. Herein we show that the M06-2X functional provides harmonic C-F stretching frequencies with an accuracy sufficient for a reliable spectra analysis. We briefly discuss the origin of this exceptional performance and show that it is likely to be related to a cancellation of errors.

The observation of the active species is the goal of most spectroscopic investigations on enantioselective organocatalysts in solution. Although NMR spectroscopy is widely applied, it has low sensitivity for conformational changes or the chiral nature of the interactions. In the present work, we exemplify the use of vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) spectroscopy for the characterization of a chiral thiourea model compound in nonpolar and polar solvents, as well as for a detailed analysis of its interaction with a model reactant. We discuss solvent-induced conformational changes of the thiourea, and provide evidence for an unexpected binding topology between the thiourea and an acetate anion. The results clearly showcase the possibilities offered by using VCD spectroscopy in the characterization of chiral organocatalysts.

Knowledge about the active conformation of an asymmetric catalyst is highly valuable in order to understand its stereoinductive power, but spectroscopic access to these structures is often limited. For the example of Takemoto's bifunctional thiourea, we demonstrate the capability of VCD spectroscopy to characterize the conformational preferences of the catalyst with and without having a reactant bound to it. In particular we show that the binding orientation of carboxylic acids can easily be derived from a computationally guided analysis of the spectra. Moreover, we identify characteristic marker bands, which are only visible in the VCD spectra of the catalyst/acid mixtures but not in the corresponding IR spectra. Lastly, we also discuss the problem that the popular DFT functional M06-2X, which we found to perform exceptionally well in the calculations of vibrational frequencies for fluorinated molecules, predicts incorrect structures of the molecular clusters. We relate this poor performance in predicting the structure of the binding topologies to an overestimation of dispersive CH-π and π-π interactions, which occur due to a neglect of the solvent molecules in the clusters. VCD spectroscopy is thus shown to be a powerful tool to identify and subsequently correct such mispredictions of solution-phase structures.