Hydrogen-bond catalysis is a type of organocatalysis that relies on use of hydrogen bonding interactions to accelerate and control organic reactions. In biological systems, hydrogen bonding plays a key role in many enzymatic reactions, both in orienting the substrate molecules and lowering barriers to reaction. However, chemists have only recently attempted to harness the power of using hydrogen bonds to perform catalysis, and the field is relatively undeveloped compared to research in Lewis acid catalysis.
Catalytic amounts of hydrogen-bond donors can promote reactions through a variety of different mechanisms. During the course of a reaction, hydrogen bonding can be used to stabilize anionic intermediates and transition states. Alternatively, some catalysts can bind small anions, enabling the formation of reactive electrophilic cations. More acidic donors can act as general or specific acids, which activate electrophiles by protonation. A powerful approach is the simultaneous activation of both partners in a reaction, e.g. nucleophile and electrophile, termed "bifunctional catalysis". In all cases, the close association of the catalyst molecule to substrate also makes hydrogen-bond catalysis a powerful method of inducing enantioselectivity.
Hydrogen-bonding catalysts are often simple to make, relatively robust, and can be synthesized in high enantiomeric purity. New reactions catalyzed by hydrogen-bond donors are being discovered at an increasing pace, including asymmetric variants of common organic reactions useful for synthesis, such as aldol additions, Diels-Alder cycloadditions and Mannich reactions.
However, there are several challenges that must be overcome before hydrogen-bond catalysis can achieve its full potential in terms of synthetic utility. Current known reactions are very substrate specific and generally exhibit low rate acceleration and turnover, thus requiring high catalyst loading. Catalysts are often discovered and optimized by trial and error, and chemists have a poor understanding of the relationship between catalyst structure and reactivity. Additionally, the field suffers from a lack of general mechanistic understanding, which has been greatly outpaced by the discovery of new reactions. With more detailed studies of structure and mechanism in the future, hydrogen-bond catalysis has great potential for enabling new, efficient, selective reactions and promising applications in asymmetric synthesis.
Catalytic strategies
Stabilization of tetrahedral intermediates
Many useful organic reactions involve the formation of tetrahedral intermediates through nucleophilic attack of functional groups such as aldehydes, amides or imines. In these cases, catalysis with hydrogen-bond donors is an attractive strategy since the anionic tetrahedral intermediates are better hydrogen-bond acceptors than the starting compound. This means that relative to the initial catalyst-substrate complex, the transition state, bearing more negative charge, is stabilized.
For example, in a typical acyl substitution reaction, the starting carbonyl compound is coordinated to the catalyst through one, two or possibly more hydrogen bonds. During the attack of the nucleophile, negative charge builds on the oxygen until the tetrahedral intermediate is reached. Therefore, the formally negative oxygen engages in a much stronger hydrogen bond than the starting carbonyl oxygen because of its increased negative charge. Energetically, this has the effect of lowering the intermediate and the transition state, thus accelerating the reaction.
This mode of catalysis is found in the active sites of many enzymes, such as the serine proteases. In this example, the amide carbonyl is coordinated to two N–H donors. These sites of multiple coordination designed to promote carbonyl reactions in biology are termed "oxyanion holes". Delivery of serine nucleophile forms a tetrahedral intermediate, which is stabilized by the increase hydrogen bonding to the oxyanion hole.
Many synthetic catalysts have been able to successfully employ this strategy to activate a variety of electrophiles. Using a chiral BINOL catalyst, for instance, the Morita-Baylis-Hillman reaction involving the addition of enones to aldehydes can be effected with high enantioselectivity. The nucleophile is an enolate-type species generated from the conjugate addition of PEt3 to the enone, and adds enantioselectively to the aldehyde coordinated to catalyst.