A Data-Driven Workflow for Assigning and Predicting Generality in Asymmetric Catalysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of chiral catalysts that can provide high enantioselectivities across a wide assortment of substrates or reaction range is a priority for many catalyst design efforts. While several approaches are available to aid in the identification of general catalyst systems, there is currently no simple procedure for directly measuring how general a given catalyst could be. Herein, we present a catalyst-agnostic workflow centered on unsupervised machine learning that enables the rapid assessment and quantification of catalyst generality. The workflow uses curated literature data sets and reaction descriptors to visualize and cluster chemical space coverage. This reaction network can then be applied to derive a catalyst generality metric through designer equations and interfaced with other regression techniques for general catalyst prediction. As validating case studies, we have successfully applied this method to identify-through-quantification the most general catalyst chemotype for an organocatalytic asymmetric Mannich reaction and predicted the most general chiral phosphoric acid catalyst for the addition of nucleophiles to imines. The mechanistic basis for catalyst generality can then be gleaned from the calculated values by deconstructing the contributions of chemical space and enantiomeric excess to the overall result. Finally, our generality techniques permitted the development of mechanistically informative catalyst screening sets that allow experimentalists to rationally select catalysts that have the highest probability of achieving a good result in the first round of reaction development. Overall, our findings represent a framework for interrogating catalyst generality, and this strategy should be relevant to other catalytic systems widely applied in asymmetric synthesis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".