Nickel‐Catalyzed Asymmetric Hydrogenation of 2‐Amidoacrylates
Yawen Hu, Jianzhong Chen, Bowen Li, Zhenfeng Zhang, Ilya D. Gridnev, Wanbin Zhang
Abstract
Abstract Earth‐abundant nickel, coordinated with a suitable chiral bisphosphine ligand, was found to be an efficient catalyst for the asymmetric hydrogenation of 2‐amidoacrylates, affording the chiral α‐amino acid esters in quantitative yields and excellent enantioselectivity (up to 96 % ee ). The active catalyst component was studied by NMR and HRMS, which helped us to realize high catalytic efficiency on a gram scale with a low catalyst loading (S/C=2000). The hydrogenated products could be simply converted into chiral α‐amino acids, β‐amino alcohols, and their bioactive derivatives. Furthermore, the catalytic mechanism was investigated using deuterium‐labeling experiments and computational calculations.