Rhodium ll -Stabilized Carbenoids Containing Both Donor and Acceptor Substituents

Rhodium(ll)-Stabilized Carbenoids Containing Both Donor and Acceptor Substituents 

The metal-catalyzed decomposition of diazo compounds has broad applications in organic synthesis [1-8]. Transient metal carbenoids provide important reactive intermediates that are capable of a wide variety of useful transformations, in which the catalyst dramatically influences the product distribution [5]. Indeed, the whole field of diazo compound decomposition was revolutionized in the early 1970s with the discovery that dirhodium tetracarboxylates 1 are effective catalysts for this process [9]. Many of the reactions that were previously low-yielding using conventional copper catalysts were found to proceed with unparalleled efficiency using this particular rhodium catalysis. The field has progressed extensively and there are some excellent reviews describing the breadth of this chemistry [5, 7, 10-17]. 

Modem Rhodium-Catalyzed Organic Reactions. Edited by P. Andrew Evans 

Copyright 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH Co. KGaA, Weinheim ISBN 3-527-30683-8 

Section 14.2 describes the highly stereoselective cyclopropanation chemistry of the donor/acceptor-carbenoids (Fig. 14.1a) [16]. This section introduces the range of vinyl, aryl, alkynyl, and heteroaryl functionalities that have been used as donor groups in this chemistry. Also, chiral auxiliaries and chiral catalysts that achieve high asymmetric induction in this chemistry are described [25]. The next two sections cover chemistry that is unique to the vinylcarbenoid system, namely [3-t4] cycloaddition with dienes (Fig. 14.1b see also Section 14.3) [13] and [3-1-2] cycloaddition with vinyl 

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I 74 Rhodium (ll)-Stabilized Carbenoids Containing Both Donor and Acceptor Substituents Tab. 14.2 Asymmetric cyclopropanation using (R)-pantolactone as the chiral auxiliary. 

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