Vitamin B₆-Based Biomimetic Asymmetric Catalysis

One of the fundamental goals of chemists is to develop highly efficient methods for producing optically active compounds, given their wide range of applications in chemistry, pharmaceutical industry, chemical biology, and material science. Biomimetic asymmetric catalysis, which imitates the structures and functions of enzymes, has emerged as an extremely attractive strategy for producing chiral compounds. This field has drawn tremendous research interest and has led to various protocols for constructing complex molecular scaffolds. The Vitamin B₆ family, including pyridoxal, pyridoxamine, pyridoxine, and the corresponding phosphorylated derivatives, serves as the cofactors to catalyze more than 200 enzymatic functions, accounting for ∼4% of all enzyme activities. Although significant progress has been made in simulating the biological roles of vitamin B₆ during the past several decades, its extraordinary catalytic power has not yet been successfully applied into asymmetric synthesis. In recent years, our group has been devoted to developing vitamin B₆-based biomimetic asymmetric catalysis using chiral pyridoxals/pyridoxamines as catalysts. We are particularly interested in mimicking the processes of enzymatic transamination and biological aldol reaction of glycine, respectively, developing asymmetric biomimetic transamination and carbonyl catalysis enabled α-C-H transformation of primary amines. Using a chiral α,α-diarylprolinol-derived pyridoxal as the catalyst, we reported the first chiral pyridoxal catalyzed asymmetric transamination of α-keto acids in 2015. A significant breakthrough in biomimetic transamination was achieved by using an axially chiral biaryl pyridoxamine catalyst that bears a lateral amine side arm. The amine side arm acts as an intramolecular base, accelerating the transamination and proving highly effective for transamination of α-keto acids and α-keto amides. In addition, we discovered the catalytic power of chiral pyridoxals as carbonyl catalysts for asymmetric biomimetic Mannich/aldol reactions of glycinates. These chiral pyridoxals also enabled more α-C-H conversions of glycinates, such as asymmetric 1,4-addition toward α,β-unsaturated esters and asymmetric α-allylation with Morita-Baylis-Hillman acetates. Moreover, carbonyl catalysis can be further applied to highly challenging primary amines with inert α-C-H bonds, such as propargylamines and benzylamines, which represents a powerful strategy for direct asymmetric α-C-H functionalization of various primary amines without protection of the NH₂ group. These biomimetic/bioinspired transformations provide efficient new protocols for the synthesis of chiral amines. Herein, we summarize our recent efforts on the development of the vitamin B₆-based biomimetic asymmetric catalysis.