Recent Advances in Kinetic Resolution of Tertiary Alcohols

Chiral tertiary alcohol is widely present in a series of bioactive compounds, natural products and pharmaceuticals. Consequently, the development of efficient asymmetric catalytic methods for their syntheses is highly important. Kinetic resolution (KR) is an important strategy to access enantioenriched alcohols from racemic alcohols. However, due to the requirement to distinguish three none-hydrogen substituents at the alpha-position of tertiary alcohols, it is challenging to develop highly efficient kinetic resolution protocols for tertiary alcohols with broad substrate scope. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made in the field of nonenzymatic kinetic resolution of tertiary alcohols in recent years, and a number of novel asymmetric reactions and catalytic systems have been successfully applied in the KR of tertiary alcohols. The tremendous advances in the kinetic resolution of tertiary alcohols are comprehensively reviewed, the substrate scope, characteristics, mechanisms and limitations of these methods are summarized, and our perspective on this research field is also provided.