Asymmetric catalytic formation of quaternary carbons by iminium ion trapping of radicals

An important goal of modern organic chemistry is to develop new catalytic strategies for enantioselective carbon–carbon bond formation that can be used to generate quaternary stereogenic centres. Whereas considerable advances have been achieved by exploiting polar reactivity¹, radical transformations have been far less successful². This is despite the fact that open-shell intermediates are intrinsically primed for connecting structurally congested carbons, as their reactivity is only marginally affected by steric factors³. Here we show how the combination of photoredox⁴ and asymmetric organic catalysis⁵ enables enantioselective radical conjugate additions to β,β-disubstituted cyclic enones to obtain quaternary carbon stereocentres with high fidelity. Critical to our success was the design of a chiral organic catalyst, containing a redox-active carbazole moiety, that drives the formation of iminium ions and the stereoselective trapping of photochemically generated carbon-centred radicals by means of an electron-relay mechanism. We demonstrate the generality of this organocatalytic radical-trapping strategy with two sets of open-shell intermediates, formed through unrelated light-triggered pathways from readily available substrates and photoredox catalysts—this method represents the application of iminium ion activation⁶ (a successful catalytic strategy for enantioselective polar chemistry) within the realm of radical reactivity.