Well-Designed Phosphine–Urea Ligand for Highly Diastereo- and Enantioselective 1,3-Dipolar Cycloaddition of Methacrylonitrile: A Combined Experimental and Theoretical Study

A novel chiral phosphine–urea bifunctional ligand has been developed for Cu-catalyzed asymmetric 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition of iminoesters with methacrylonitrile, a long-standing challenging substrate in asymmetric catalysis. Distortion–interaction energy analysis based on density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveals that the distortion energy plays an important role in the observed enantioselectivity, which can be attributed to the...