CO2 and asymmetry: reviewing the advances in enantioselective catalytic strategies

Abstract

The utilization of carbon dioxide as a C1 feedstock to construct molecules has been extensively studied and successfully employed in diverse catalytic processes. In this context, asymmetric organic transformations leveraging the abundant, inexpensive, and renewable CO₂ to synthesize chiral molecules appear to be a highly attractive and powerful strategy. Recently, this approach has been successfully extended to photo and electrochemical aspects and leads to new synthetic opportunities with extensive applications. Here, we summarize the advances of the last two decades in asymmetric CO₂ fixation including chemical, photochemical and electrochemical pathways, highlighting the reaction strategies, activation modes, mechanistic insights, and reactivity of various substrates.