A novel synthetic approach to 2-aryltetralones with high ee has been developed through asymmetric 1,4-addition of arylboronic acids to naphthoquinone monoketals catalyzed by a rhodium complex with the (R,R)-Ph-bod* ligand. The asymmetric addition proceeded in high yields with excellent enantioselectivity.Keywords: asymmetric catalysis; boron; chiral diene ligands; conjugate addition; quinone monoketals; rhodium Enantiomerically pure carbonyl compounds bearing aryl or alkenyl groups at the a position to the carbonyl moiety, which are represented by the 2-aryltetralones, constitute key intermediates to biologically important compounds.[1] Although their preparation using a stoichiometric amount of chiral reagents has been reported, [1,2] their catalytic asymmetric synthesis has not been well developed. The palladium-or nickel-catalyzed asymmetric a-arylation [3] and a-alkenylation [4] of carbonyl compounds provides an efficient method for the synthesis of chiral ketones substituted with quaternary stereogenic centers, but their application to the asymmetric synthesis of products containing hydrogen at the chiral carbon should present a problem due to the difficulty in keeping the stereogenic character of the chiral carbon center bound to an acidic hydrogen under basic conditions at a high reaction temperature. Another important method of providing a-chiral ketones is the catalytic asymmetric protonation of enolates, [5][6][7] but the asymmetric synthesis at the stage of carbon-carbon bond formation is more desirable. Our approach is to apply the rhodium-catalyzed asymmetric 1,4-addition [8,9] to the asymmetric synthesis of a-aryl ketones. Herein we report that the asymmetric 1,4-addition of aryl-and alkenylboron reagents to quinone monoketals [10] is efficiently catalyzed by a chiral diene/rhodium complex [11][12][13][14] and one of the enantioenriched addition products (96-99 % ee) is readily converted into a 2-aryltetralone without loss of enantiomeric purity.