For the design of imidazole-based chiral organocatalysts, the most widely adopted approach is to introduce chiral substituent(s) to an imidazole core. However, such a strategy in design usually leads to imidazoles with complicated structure and/or chemically labile bond(s) (A–E). An alternative approach is to create imidazoles with 'topological chirality', such as axial, helical or planar chirality. In these cases, a well-defined dissymmetric structure may be constructed by ...
