BIO PRE-ORGANOCATS · Biomimetic Multibinding Pre-Organocatalysts

Catalysis is an important field in chemistry because it allows to perform more environmentally and economically sustainable chemical processes. The end of the last century was dominated by the use of metal catalysts, which are expensive and pollutants. In the last decade, a new trend towards using small and relatively simple organic molecules as catalysts has witnessed incredible growth. These organocatalysts have become very popular but there are still several limitations related with their efficiency and selectivity that frustrate their incorporation to industrial processes. The massive screening approach undertaken until our days to solve these limitations has been proved inefficient, so a more rational approach seems necessary.In the last two years, deep mechanistic analyses performed by the coordinator of this proposal and others have shed light over the elements that control the reactivity and selectivity of organocatalytic reactions. The new mechanisms proposed have rationalized strange phenomena previously observed, have put an end to wrong preconceived ideas and have opened a new approach to organocatalysts design.This project intends to take advantage of the new catalytic downstream intermediates that will generate a Curtin–Hammett scenario. Under these conditions, the different thermodynamic stability of the intermediates will determine the reactivity and selectivity of the organocatalysts. This new design strategy is complementary to the classical one, which uses the different kinetic reactivity of a common intermediate as a determining factor.The multibinding organocatalysts will exploit the advantage of the Curtin–Hammett scenario and will benefit from catalytic downstream intermediates. In addition, the design proposed in this project has other advantages, such as the reduction of catalyst deactivation processes by using bio-inspired pre-organocatalysts and the possibility to easily create extensive multicomponent organocatalyst libraries.