10: Organocatalysis

This chapter provides a guide to the use of organocatalysis as a general catalytic concept in synthetic chemistry and aims to demonstrate the fundamental ideas and reasoning that lie behind the most popular strategies in this area. The key to the rapid growth in this field within the least two decades lies in an improved understanding of the different modes of reactivity available through organocatalysis, which has allowed the field to develop in a systematic manner. The main emphasis of this chapter is not to give a comprehensive coverage of this research area, but to introduce the fundamental concepts of organocatalysis by broadly organising the most powerful methodologies for enantioselective organocatalysis under the categories of Brønsted acid, Brønsted base, Lewis acid and Lewis base catalysis.