A chiral amino alcohol based ligand was found to promote the highly enantioselective addition of terminal conjugated diynes to aromatic and aliphatic aldehydes. The combination of easily available C -symmetric (R)- and (S)-BINOL with Ti(OiPr) , Zn powder, and EtI was also found to catalyze the asymmetric addition of 1,3-diynes to aldehydes under mild reaction conditions, and thus, both enantiomers of the chiral conjugated diynols could be prepared with high enantioselectivities. The resulting optically active conjugated diynols were found to have potential anticancer activities with significant differences against HepG2 and HeLa cancer cells, and remarkable enantioselective cytotoxicity was observed for the first time.

An efficient synthesis of azines from the reaction of N‐heterocyclic carbene precursors with N‐tosylhydrazones has been developed. This method avoids the direct use of diazo compounds and allows the synthesis of structurally diverse azines. An azine was further found to exhibit strong yellow fluorescence and shows promise as a reagent for biological imaging.magnified image