Efficient separation of a trifluoromethyl substituted organocatalyst: just add water.

A practical, cost-saving tagging approach is developed which takes advantage of the hydrophobicity of trifluoromethyl groups, exemplified by the application and recovery of a CBS precatalyst using tuned aqueous-organic media with minimum 50% water content.

Recoverable fluorous CBS methodology for asymmetric reduction of ketones.

[reaction: see text]. An operationally simple and recoverable fluorous CBS methodology was developed. The in situ-generated fluorous oxazaborolidine efficiently catalyzed the reduction of ketones with high enantioselectivity and reactivity.