Soai reaction

Rare card · No. 20111

In organic chemistry, the Soai reaction is the alkylation of pyrimidine-5-carbaldehyde, a 5-pyrimidyl alkanol, with diisopropylzinc. The reaction is autocatalytic and leads to rapidly increasing amounts of the same enantiomer of the product. The product pyrimidyl alcohol is chiral and induces that same chirality in further catalytic cycles. Starting with a low enantiomeric excess ("ee") produces a product with very high enantiomeric excess. The reaction has been studied for clues about the origin of homochirality among certain classes of biomolecules. The Japanese chemist Kensō Soai (1950–) discovered the reaction in 1995. For his work in "elucidating the origins of chirality and homochirality", Soai received the Chemical Society of Japan award in 2010, and the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 2026 "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis" jointly with Henri B. Kagan. Other chiral additives can be used as the initial source of asymmetric induction...

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