Acetylenes reactions with Fischer carbene

The reactions of Fischer carbene complexes with alkynes can under certain conditions lead to products that result from the incorporation of two alkynes, the carbene ligand and a carbon monoxide. In inter-molecular reactions, this is most commonly observed for acetylene itself or for sterically unhindered al-kynes. °2 As can be anticipated by the mechanism in Scheme 36, two-alkyne incorporated products of the type (258) are also favored for high alkyne concentration. Synthetically, the two-alkyne reactions are most useful in intramolecular reactions, two of which have been reported and are exemplified by the reactions in Scheme 43. The typical product from the reaction of a Fischer carbene complex with a diyne, such as (308), is a bicyclic phenol of the type (309). ° These products are apparently the result of the assembly of pieces indicated by (311). Under some conditions, dienones of the type (310) and (314) can be isolated, and it is thought they are the immediate precursors of the phenol products via an in situ reduction by a chromium(O) species. This reaction is completely regioselective with diyne (308) and the phenol (309) results from incorporation of the terminal alkyne of (308) before the disubstituted alkyne. Phenols of the type (309) have also been observed from the reaction of diynes with carbyne complexes. ... 

Pericyclic reactions involving thiophenes have been utilized to prepare a variety of complex heterocycles. The intramolecular Diels-Alder reaction of 2-vinylbenzo[i]thiophene 92 produced a pair of tetracyclic adducts 93 and 94 <02TL3963>. Coupling of Fischer carbene 96 with 3-alkynylthiophene 95 led to the formation of thieno[2,3-c]pyran-3-one 97 in one step <02JOC4177>. An intramolecular cycloaddition of 97 then afforded tetracyclic adduct 98. A ruthenium-catalyzed cyclodimerization reaction involving bis-thienyl acetylene derivatives was... 

Acetylenes can undergo a number of thermal and transition metal promoted cycloaddition reactions. Besides the [2 + 2 + 2] cycloaddition (see Sect. 5) the reaction of acetylenes with late transition metal (so-called Fischer ) carbenes is noteworthy for the synthesis of highly and regioselectively functionalized naphthalene derivatives (Dotz reaction), while the co-cycloaddition of acetylenes with alkenes and carbon monoxide gives cyclopentenones (Pauson-Khand reaction) [159,160]. 

The benzannulation reaction is a versatile method for the formation of polysubstituted aromatic compounds such as naphthoquinones. This three-component coupling involves the reaction between an a. unsaturated Fischer carbene, an acetylene, and a CO ligand, and initially proceeds by cycloaddition of the alkyne with the carbene complex. The regioselectivity of this step is highly dependent on the substituents on the acetylene moiety and is usually low in the case of internal acetylenes. 

It was first observed by Woon (1974) and Farona (1974) that acetylenes could be polymerized by catalysts of the type Mo(CO)3(toluene). This was followed by the discovery that conventional metathesis catalysts such as M0CI5 (Masuda 1974) and WCls (Navarro 1976 Masuda 1976), with or without a cocatalyst, could also bring about polymerization of acetylenes. At first there was some doubt as to whether these polymerizations were being propagated by the metathesis mechanism (Scheme 10.2) or whether a Ziegler-Natta mechanism was operating. However, the observation that metal carbene complexes could react with acetylenic molecules to form simple adducts as in reaction (20) (Fischer, H. 1980), and the fact that such complexes could initiate the polymerization of acetylenes, albeit somewhat slowly, but cleanly and in fair yield, soon allayed these doubts. 

The starting Fischer-type carbene complexes 1 were obtained by Michael addition of dimethylamine to the carbon-carbon triple bond of the corresponding ethoxy-(phenylethynyl)carbenes. In this regard, de Meijere and co-workers observed that the reactions of several primary and secondary amines with this sort of carbenes, in particular chromium derivatives 3 containing bulky substituents at the terminal carbon of the acetylenic unit, result in formation of the aminoallenylidene derivatives 5 as by-products of the expected Michael adducts 4 (Scheme 2) [20-24]. 

P. Quayle and co-workers utilized the Dotz benzannulation reaction for the synthesis of diterpenoid quinones." The authors developed a novel synthetic approach to 12-O-methyl royleanone using a simple vinyl chromium carbene complex along with a disubstituted oxygenated acetylene. The bicyclic hydrazone was converted to the corresponding vinyllithium derivative by the Shapiro reaction and then functionalized to give the desired crude Fischer chromium carbene complex. The benzannulation took place in refluxing THF with excellent regioselectivity, and the natural product was obtained in 37% overall yield from the hydrazone. 

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