Octahedral Ruthenium Complex with Exclusive Metal-Centered Chirality for Highly Effective Asymmetric Catalysis

A novel ruthenium catalyst is introduced which contains solely achiral ligands and acquires its chirality entirely from octahedral centro­chirality. The configurationally stable catalyst is demonstrated to catalyze the alkynyl­ation of trifluoro­methyl ketones with very high enantio­selectivity (up to >99% ee) at low catalyst loadings (down to 0.2 mol%)