2026-02-24
Recently, Professors Guo Haiming and Xie Mingsheng of our university, in collaboration with Distinguished Research Fellow Tian Yin of Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, published a research paper titled Catalytic asymmetric sulfonimidoyl transfer to access chiral sulfonimidoyl fluorides and related derivatives in Nature Chemistry, a Nature Portfolio journal. Li Ning, a doctoral student from the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, is the first author of the paper; Guo Haiming, Xie Mingsheng and Tian Yin are the corresponding authors; and Henan Normal University is the first author affiliation.
Sulfur fluoride exchange (SuFEx) reactions have broad applications. Due to the sterically crowded three-dimensional environment of sulfonimidoyl groups, chiral sulfonimidoyl group transfer remains highly challenging. Using an independently developed chiral 4-aryl-pyridine N-oxide as the catalyst and racemic sulfonimidoyl chlorides as reactants, the study successfully realized a catalytic asymmetric sulfonimidoyl group transfer reaction, constructing optically active sulfonimidoyl fluorides and their derivatives. Experimental and theoretical computational studies showed that the reaction is a dynamic kinetic asymmetric transformation, and that a two-catalyst-bound pentacoordinate sulfur intermediate is key to achieving in situ racemization of the sulfur configuration. The optically active sulfonimidoyl fluorides obtained in the study can serve as general three-dimensional SuFEx connecting arms and undergo stereospecific ligation reactions with a variety of nucleophiles, providing a modular platform for the efficient construction of optically active functional sulfur(VI) molecules. This work offers a new approach to addressing the synthetic challenges of chiral sulfur(VI) compounds and opens up new directions for the development of chiral nucleophilic catalysts and asymmetric sulfonimidoyl transfer reactions.
The findings are expected to play a key role in fields such as medicinal chemistry and click chemistry.
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and other projects, and represents an important advance by our university in the field of asymmetric catalysis.
Paper link:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-026-02071-3
(Li Bin and Wang Manman, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering)
