Recent advances in catalytic asymmetric reactions - Asymmetric activation

A new strategy for asymmetric synthesis, namely asymmetric activation, is presented and some of its recent advances are reviewed. with asymmetric activation strategy, a chiral or even racemic catalyst may be selectively activated by a chiral activator to yield non - racemic products. The advantage of this approach over the deactivation strategy is that the activated catalyst can produce a greater enantiomeric excess in the products than the enantiomerically pure catalyst can alone.