New designed surfactants for selective homogeneous catalysis in water

Abstract

The employment of water as a solvent for organic reaction, even if it is strongly recommended by the principles of green chemistry, it's not always possible due to low solubility of reactants. Micellar media provides a good solution to this problem. Surfactants, thanks to their molecular structure which present both a hydrophilic and a hydrophobic moieties, provide suitable self-assembled nano-environments to promote chemical transformations in water. In this work a novel class of sitosterol-based neutral surfactant is proposed, synthesized, and tested in traditional cross coupling reactions and compared to other commercially available surfactants. Due to the intrinsic chirality of the proposed designer surfactants, exploration of their employment in stereoselective reactions is reported as well.