The Construction of Molecular Complexity from Functionalized Alkylidenecyclopropanes (FACPs)

As a special family of cyclopropanes, alkylidenecyclopropanes (ACPs), exhibit outstanding physical and chemical activities, which provide opportunities to participate in fascinating chemical transformations to access cyclopropane-containing units without ring-opening processes and other unavailable compounds through conventional routes with ring-opening processes owing to their strain-driven reactivity and synthetic accessibility. Nowadays, intramolecular reactions of methylenecyclopropanes (MCPs) or ACPs with adjacent functionalities have emerged as a powerful synthetic protocol for the construction of a variety of polycyclic and heterocyclic compounds with different sized skeletons through catalytic methods. Recently, we put forward the concept of functional alkylidenecyclopropanes (FACPs) and in this Minireview, we will summarize the reactions of FACPs after 2016 including several important early works from three aspects: 1) reactions with distal C-C bond cleavage, 2) reactions with proximal C-C bond cleavage (including ring-expansion reactions), and 3) reactions without C-C bond cleavage.