Olefin Metathesis – Recent Developments

Siegfried Blechert

Institut für Organische Chemie, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

During the last few years olefin metathesis has gained significant importance in organic chemistry. Besides ring-opening metathesis polymerisation (ROMP), ring-closing metathesis (RCM) has attracted major attention. However, ring-opening metathesis (ROM) and selective cross-metathesis (CM) are also of increasing interest.

This lecture deals with these reactions and with the combination of ROM, RCM, and CM. Selective CM between olefins and substituted triple bonds or RCM-ROM of alkynyl substituted cycloolefins leads to butadienes. These compounds are very useful for further transformations including Diels-Alder reactions to give heterocycles such as 1. Domino processses were also applied to the synthesis of natural products such as anaferine (2) and swainsonine (3). Some new developments concerning homo- and heterogeneous metathesis catalysts will also be presented.