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As a result of the low reactivity of simple esters, the use of them as nucleophiles in direct asymmetric transformations is a long-standing challenge in synthetic organic chemistry. Nature approaches this difficulty through a decarboxylative mechanism, which is used for polyketide synthesis. Inspired by nature, we report guanidine-catalyzed biomimetic decarboxylative C-C and C-N bond-formation reactions. These highly enantioselective decarboxylative Mannich and amination reactions utilized malonic acid half thioesters as simple ester surrogates. It is proposed that nucleophilic addition precedes decarboxylation in the mechanism, which has been investigated in detail through the identification of intermediates by using electrospray ionization (ESI) mass-spectrometric analysis and DFT calculations.

Chiral bicyclic guanidine can act as an efficient chiral Brønsted base catalyst in enantioselective reactions, delivering good yields with high enantioselectivities. There is interest in understanding the detailed mechanisms of these guanidine-catalyzed reactions. Herein, we performed a detailed kinetic study of three different types of chiral bicyclic guanidine-catalyzed reactions, determining the bifunctionality of our guanidine catalyst. Although these three reactions share a similar catalytic cycle, their intrinsic kinetic behaviors are significantly different from each other because of the difference in the rate-determining step. The calculated theoretical rate expression for each reaction, as a result of the mechanism elucidated with density functional theory calculations, agrees well with the respective experimentally observed rate equation.

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