A Bottom Up Approach Towards Artificial Oxygenases by Combining Iron Coordination Complexes and Peptides

Supramolecular systems resulting from the combination of peptides and a chiral iron coordination complex catalyze asymmetric epoxidation with aqueous hydrogen peroxide, providing good to excellent yields and high enantioselectivities in short reaction times. The peptide is shown to play a dual role; the terminal carboxylic acid assists the iron center in the efficient H₂O₂ activation step, while its β-turn structure is crucial to induce high enantioselectivity in the oxygen delivering step. The high levels of stereoselection (84-92% ee) obtained by these supramolecular catalysts in the epoxidation of 1,1'-alkyl orthosubstituted styrenes, a notoriously challenging class of substrates for asymmetric catalysis, are not attainable with any other epoxidation methodology described so far. The current work combining an iron center ligated to N and O based ligands, and a peptide scaffold that shapes the second coordination sphere may be seen as a bottom up approach towards the design of artificial oxygenases.