The crystallographic structure of a Lewis acid-assisted chiral Bronsted acid as an enantioselective protonation reagent for silyl enol ethers

It is difficult to control the enantioselectivity in the protonation of silyl enol ethers with simple chiral Brønsted acids, mainly due to bond flexibility between the proton and its chiral counterion, the orientational flexibility of the proton, and the fact that the proton sources available are limited to acidic compounds such as chiral carboxylic acids. To overcome these difficulties, we have developed a Lewis acid-assisted chiral Brønsted acid (LBA) system. The coordination of Lewis acids with Brønsted acids restricts the orientation of protons and increases their acidity. Optically active binaphthol (BINOL) derivative·SnCl4 complexes are very effective as enantioselective protonation reagents for silyl enol ethers. However, their exact structures have not yet been determined. We describe here optically active 1,2-diarylethane-1,2-diol derivative·SnCl4 as a new type of LBA for the enantioselective protonation as well as its crystallographic structure. A variety of optically active 1,2-diarylethane-1,2-diols could be readily prepared by asymmetric syn-dihydroxylation. This is a great advantage over BINOL for the flexible design of a new LBA. The most significant finding is that we were able to specify the conformational direction of the H-O bond of LBA, which has some asymmetric inductivity, by X-ray diffraction analysis. The stereochemical course in the enantioselective protonation of silyl enol ethers using LBA would be controlled by a linear OH/π interaction with an initial step. The absolute stereopreference in enantioselective reactions using BINOL·SnCl4 can also be explained in terms of this uniformly mechanistic interpretation. Copyright © 2003 American Chemical Society.