Despite the popularity of boron and silicon allylation reagents in stereocontrolled synthesis, they suffer from a number of inherent limitations that have slowed down their development as synthetic tools for nucleophilic additions to carbonyl compounds and imine derivatives. These limitations are the low reactivity and diastereoselectivity of allyl trialkylsilane reagents, and the lack of catalytic systems for the activation and substoichiometric control of enantioselectivity in the additions of allyl boron reagents. To develop more efficient and general methods for the control of absolute stereochemistry in the resulting homoallylic alcohols, new approaches aimed at solving the problem of activation of allylic boron and silicon reagents are needed. This Minireview describes a number of recent approaches that have been devised to address this problem.

This communication successfully challenges the perception that the additions of allylbonates to aldehydes cannot be catalyzed effectively by added Lewis acids. Using a novel class of isomerically pure, tetrasubstituted 2-alkoxycarbonyl allylboronates (1), we describe that some metals (for example, Sc(OTf)(3) and Cu(OTf)(2)) allow these reagents to add onto aldehydes to yield gamma-lactone products 2 in good yields at temperatures almost 100 degrees C lower than the corresponding uncatalyzed reactions. The large rate enhancement over the uncatalyzed reaction provides a highly improved practical approach to access aldol-like adducts with a stereogenic quaternary carbon center. The crucial role of the 2-alkoxycarbonyl group on allylboronates 1 was demonstrated with control experiments using a model allylboronate lacking such an ester group. Moreover, the stereospecificity observed in the uncatalyzed allylborations is preserved. These observations raise intriguing mechanistic issues such as the suggestion that type I allylmetal behavior is maintained in this unprecedented catalytic reaction manifold.

A series of 1,n-dioxa[n](2,7)pyrenophanes (n = 7-12) with increasingly nonplanar pyrene moieties was synthesized by a 9-10 step sequence starting from 5-hydroxyisophthalic acid. The crystal structure of each member of this series was determined crystallographically. Several spectroscopic properties were found to vary with the extent of the nonplanarity of the pyrene unit. The way in which the distortion from planarity of the pyrene system influences its pi-electron delocalization was investigated by using two quantitative descriptors of aromaticity based on geometry (HOMA) and magnetism (magnetic susceptibility and NICS). Both methods suggest that the aromaticity of the pyrene moiety is diminished only slightly upon increasing the bend angle theta from 0 degrees to 109.2 degrees.