The formation of amide bonds by direct reaction of amines with carboxylic acids by thermal [1, 2] or catalytic methods [2][3][4][5] is generally a high temperature process. There have been no reports to date of any reactions that involve asymmetric induction during direct amide formation, with the exception of an enzyme-catalyzed process.[6] Lower temperatures are often preferred for any reaction as it can reduce the amount of reagent, reactant, or thermal product degradation. A more important consideration is that asymmetric induction processes are usually more efficient at lower temperatures because small differences in energy between diasteroisomeric transition states are amplified; however, there are an increasing number of examples where this is not the case and improved asymmetric induction can be obtained at higher temperatures. [7] With these considerations in mind, we endeavored to develop a catalytic direct amide formation under mild conditions, though still well above room temperature. The current limiting temperature appears to be 85 8C, the temperature at which reactions can be carried out with bifunctional aminoboronic acid catalysts by using azeotropic water removal in fluorobenzene.[2] Although these reaction conditions are relatively mild compared to all other direct amide formation reactions with boron-derived catalyts, [4,5] they do not completely preclude the thermal direct amide formation with the more reactive carboxylic acid/amine combinations.[2] Though the prospect of developing asymmetric catalysts for amide formation may not look promising, [7] we report herein preliminary results that demonstrate asymmetric processes are possible under elevated temperatures with the development of a planar chiral ferrocenederived bifunctional aminoboronic acid catalyst.Our recent interests in the development of bifunctional aminoboronic acids as potential catalysts [8] led to the development of N,N-di-iso-propylbenzylaminoboronic acid type catalysts [2] such as commercially available 1 and planar chiral ferrocene analogue 2. We recently reported using a (À)-sparteine-directed metallation to provide 2 in 96 % ee.[9]Attempts to prepare other planar chiral aminoboronic acids such as 3 were hindered by the lack of direct access by asymmetric deprotonation methods of ferrocene benzimidazole precursors.[8d] However, this was circumvented by the synthesis of 3 from the known [10] (pS)-bromoferrocene aldehyde 4 (Scheme 1).Coupling aldehyde 4 with diamine 5[8c] in the presence of Oxone gave bromoferrocenylbenzimidazole 6 in 89 % yield and 99 % ee (determined by chiral HPLC methods, see the Supplementary Information), which compares with a literature value of 98 % ee for aldehyde 4.[10] Subsequent lithiumhalogen exchange of 6 provided enantioenriched catalyst 3 (60 % yield).A series of parallel experiments were conducted with catalysts 2 and 3, in which carboxylic acids 7 a-b were reacted with amines 8 a-c in refluxing fluorobenzene by using activated 3-molecular sieves in a Soxhlet (solvent drying system). Th...