Efficient Synthesis of Optically Active Alcohols

1Introduction Optically active secondary alcohols are versatile building blocks for synthesis of unnatural biological active compounds and functional materials. Therefore, study on efficient synthesis of optically active alcohols is becoming an important subject in synthetic organic chemistry. Catalytic asymmetric reduction of carbonyl compounds is a practical method to create chiral alcohols. For the past decades, a large number of catalytic methods have been developed to achieve this goal.