Stereochemistry in Action

Dear Colleagues,

Stereochemistry is an important area of chemistry which started with the fundamental contribution of Louis Pasteur in 1848, and in 1874, it acquired three-dimensional spatial characteristics with the hypothesis of Le Bel and vant’t Hoff. Another important landmark in the development of stereochemistry was set by Sir Derek Barton and Odd Hassel in 1950, through the introduction of conformational analysis, and in 1951 by Johannes Martin Bijvoet, with his study on anomalous X-ray scattering that allowed absolute configuration assignment. In later years, several phases of development were observed, being greatly accelerated by the emergence of modern instrumentation methods like nuclear resonance spectroscopy, circular dichroism, optical rotary dispersion, and X-ray crystallography. Soon after the thalidomide tragedy in the 1950s/1960s, it became obvious that stereodifferentiation in a living system is a general rule, not an exemption, which had enormous consequences for science. This therefore resulted in a significant increase in interest in dynamic stereochemistry, asymmetric synthesis, topicity and prostereoisomerism, as well as chemical topology and cyclostereoisomerism. Stereochemistry is no longer an isolated field of fundamental science and has become tightly linked with many branches of chemistry, medicinal chemistry, polimer science, new materials engineering, and many others. Over the last decades, an impressive development has been made in the area of stereocontrolled organic synthesis. Scientists now have a wide range of tools for effective optical activation, among them chiral catalysts or organocatalysts for the creation of the desired spatial arrangement of the molecule.

This Special Issue aimes to invite contributions on all aspects of organic stereochemistry, including its dynamic aspects studied by various physicochemical methods (X-ray, VT NMR, ECD, VCD, etc.) as well as being important in asymmetric synthesis.

Prof. Dr. Zbigniew Czarnocki
Dr. Joanna Szawkało
Guest Editors

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