Rapid determination of enantiomeric excess: a focus on optical approaches.

High-throughput screening (HTS) methods are becoming increasingly essential in discovering chiral catalysts or auxiliaries for asymmetric transformations due to the advent of parallel synthesis and combinatorial chemistry. Both parallel synthesis and combinatorial chemistry can lead to the exploration of a range of structural candidates and reaction conditions as a means to obtain the highest enantiomeric excess (ee) of a desired transformation. One current bottleneck in these approaches to asymmetric reactions is the determination of ee, which has led researchers to explore a wide range of HTS techniques. To be truly high-throughput, it has been proposed that a technique that can analyse a thousand or more samples per day is needed. Many of the current approaches to this goal are based on optical methods because they allow for a rapid determination of ee due to quick data collection and their parallel analysis capabilities. In this critical review these techniques are reviewed with a discussion of their respective advantages and drawbacks, and with a contrast to chromatographic methods (180 references). This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2012