23Enantioselective Alkene Hydrogenation: Introduction and Historic Overview
Development of CAMP and DIPAMPDuring the late 1960s, Horner et al. [13] and Knowles and Sabacky [14] independently found that a chiral monodentate tertiary phosphine, in the presence of a rhodium complex, could provide enantioselective induction for a hydrogenation, although the amount of induction was small [15][16][17][18][19][20]. The chiral phosphine ligand replaced the triphenylphosphine in a Wilkinson-type catalyst [10,21,22]. At about this time, it was also found that [Rh(COD) 2 ] + or [Rh(NBD) 2 ] + could be used as catalyst precursors, without the need to perform ligand exchange reactions [23].Knowles found that the monophosphine CAMP (1a) could provide an ee-value of up to 88% for the reduction of dehydroamino acids. CAMP was an extension of PAMP (1b) that provides ee-values of 50-60% in analogous reactions [24]. At this time, Kagan showed that DIOP (2) (vide infra), where the stereogenic centers are not at phosphorus, could also provide enantioselective induction in an hydrogenation. DIOP also showed that a bisphosphine need not have the chirality at phosphorus, and that good stereoselectivity might result from a C 2 -symmetric ligand. Knowles then developed the C 2 -symmetric ligand DIPAMP (3) [22,25]. The use of Rh-DIPAMP for the synthesis of l-Dopa is well known and is still practiced today [12,22,27]. A number of variations of the DIPAMP structure were investigated for the synthesis of this important pharmaceutical, but the parent remains the best ligand in this class [22].