Cyanide-Free Enantioselective Catalytic Strategies for the Synthesis of Chiral Nitriles.

The development of enantioselective syntheses of nitriles gained increasing interest due to, e.g., an increasing demand for chiral nitriles for drug synthesis. Complementing existing routes, recently catalytic processes enabling an enantioselective formation of the chiral nitrile moiety without the need to utilize cyanide were accomplished. It is noteworthy that these processes are complementary to each other as they are based on different types of substrates, catalytic methods (utilizing chemo- and biocatalysts), and stereochemical reaction concepts (asymmetric synthesis versus resolution).