Yannick Geiger

University of Strasbourg | UNISTRA · Chimie de la Matière Complexe (CMC

The transition of chemistry into biology is poorly understood. Key questions include how the inherently divergent nature of chemical reactions can be curtailed, and whether Darwinian principles from biology extend to chemistry. Addressing both questions simultaneously, we now show that the evolutionary principle of competitive exclusion, which stat...

The authors wish to make the following correction to their paper [...]

The transition of chemistry into biology is poorly understood. One of the key questions in this transition is how the inherently divergent nature of chemical reactions can be curtailed, allowing product mixtures to become enriched in only a limited subset of all possible reaction products. Another seemingly unrelated question is whether Darwinian p...

[Free read-only link: https://rdcu.be/dAAg7] Asymmetric catalysis has expanded the range of chiral products readily accessible through increasingly efficient synthetic catalysts. The development of these catalysts often starts with a result obtained by systematic screening of known privileged chiral structures and assumes that the active species w...

La catalyse asymétrique utilisant un catalyseur optiquement actif pour induire une chiralité lors de la synthèse d'une substance d'intérêt est la stratégie de choix pour produire cette substance avec la plus grande énantiopureté. Dès lors, il était généralement accepté que la pureté énantiomérique du catalyseur employé pour effectuer cette transfor...

Self-replicating molecules provide a simple approach for investigating fundamental processes in scenarios of the emergence of life. Although homochirality is an important aspect of life and of how it emerged, the effects of chirality on self-replicators have received only little attention so far. Here, we report several self-assembled self-replicat...

Self-replicating molecules provide a simple approach for investigating fundamental processes in scenarios of the emergence of life. Although homochirality is an important aspect of life and of how it emerged, the effects of chirality on self-replicators have received only little attention so far. Here we report several self-assembled self-replicato...

Asymmetric catalysis has expanded the range of chiral products readily accessible through increasingly efficient synthetic catalysts. The development of these catalysts often starts with a result obtained by systematic screening of known privileged chiral structures and is based on the assumption that the active species would be an isolated monomol...

Phenomena related to asymmetric amplification are considered to be key to understanding the emergence of homochirality in life. In asymmetric catalysis, theoretical and experimental models have been studied to understand such chiral amplification, in particular based on non-linear effects. Three decades after the theoretical demonstration that a ch...

Non‐linear effects between the enantiomeric excesses of both the ligand and the product are ubiquitous phenomena in asymmetric catalysis, allowing asymmetric amplification (or depletion) and are widely used tools for mechanistic investigations. Non‐linear effects are caused by catalyst aggregation; however, the effect of catalyst precipitation on N...

For over 25 years the chemistry community has puzzled over the mechanism of the Soai reaction, a fascinating chemical process which achieves chiral symmetry breaking by combining autocatalysis with asymmetric amplification. In 2020, the groups of Denmark and Trapp each made a proposal, based on extensive experimental work, on what is the catalytic...

The Front Cover shows Mont Aiguille, located in the Vercors massif, France. The limestone cliffs of Mont Aiguille are very popular with climbers. Its first climb in 1492 would have marked the birth of mountaineering. From a chemist′s point of view, the sea of fog can hide a complex landscape as in the case of asymmetric catalysis where linearity be...

An in‐depth study of the catalytic system, consisting of the enantioselective addition of ZnEt2 to benzaldehyde with (1R,2S)‐(−)‐N‐Methylephedrine (NME) as chiral ligand, suggests the presence of dimeric and trimeric aggregates, as deduced from product ee vs. catalyst loading and NMR investigations (¹H, DOSY). Formation of catalyst aggregation was...

p>An in-depth study of the catalytic system, consisting of the enantioselective addition of ZnEt₂ to benzaldehyde with (1 R ,2 S )-(-)-N-Methylephedrine (NME) as chiral ligand, suggests the presence of dimeric and trimeric aggregates, as deduced from product ee vs catalyst loading and NMR investigations (¹H, DOSY). Formation o...

An in-depth study of the catalytic system, consisting of the enantioselective addition of ZnEt2 to benzaldehyde with (1R,2S)-(-)-N-Methylephedrine (NME) as chiral ligand, suggests the presence of dimeric and trimeric aggregates, as deduced from product ee vs catalyst loading and NMR investigations (1H, DOSY). Formation of catalyst aggregate was exc...

The chiral ligand N-methylephedrine (NME) was found to catalyse the addition of dimethylzinc to benzaldehyde in an enantiodivergent way, with a monomeric and a homochiral dimeric complex both catalysing the reaction at a steady state and giving opposite product enantiomers. A change in the sign of the enantiomeric product was thus possible by simpl...

Asymmetric amplification is a phenomenon that is believed to play a key role in the emergence of homochirality in life. In asymmetric catalysis, theoretical and experimental models have been investigated to provide an understanding of how chiral amplification is possible, in particular based on non‐linear effects. Interestingly, it has been propose...

Asymmetric amplification is a curious phenomenon that is believed to play a key role in the emergence of biological homochirality, and thus of life itself. In asymmetric catalysis, it is achieved via positive nonlinear effects, which allow high product enantiomeric excesses with a non-enantiopure catalyst. However, it has also been proposed that no...

In this paper, we theoretically discuss the enantiodivergent product formation in asymmetric catalysis, a process in which the sign of the overall product enantiomer switches upon a change of catalyst concentration. The presented model is based on a catalytic system that consists of both discrete and dimeric aggregated metal complexes, in competiti...

1) A hyperpositive non-linear effect (NLE) was observed in the enantioselective addition of dialkylzincs to benzaldehyde catalyzed by chiral N-benzyl ephedrine. This is the first experimental evidence of such phenomenon were the maximum product ee is not achieved with an enantiopure, but a scalemic catalyst. The origin for this hyperpositive NLE wa...

Asymmetric amplification is a phenomenon that plays a key role in the emergence of homochirality in life. In asymmetric catalysis, theoretical and experimental models have been investigated for understanding how chiral amplification is possible, in particular through non-linear effect. In the most remarkable cases, the degree of enantio-induction f...

Since chiral coordination complexes have a broad scope for asymmetric synthesis, their immobilization has been the subject of intensive research. Indeed, the immobilization of chiral catalysts is an appealing approach to solve problems such as product contamination or catalyst reuse. Numerous approaches have been developed and despite promising res...