Functionalized N-heterocyclic carbene ligands are particularly useful and widely applied ligands in transition-metal chemistry and catalysis. In this article we introduce an emerging synthetic method for functionalized N-heterocyclic carbene ligands developed from the reactivity study on cyclometalated N-heterocyclic carbene compounds, namely postfunctionalization. The status quo of this method for the preparation of novel donorfunctionalized N-heterocyclic carbene complexes and their application in catalysis are discussed. N-Heterocyclic carbenes (NHC) have emerged as a class of very useful ligands in organometallic chemistry and transition-metal catalysis. 1 Along with people's efforts to develop new carbene ligands, 2 endeavors on NHC-based chelating ligands have also been exercised and have led to the emergence of a large body of such ligands bearing versatile chelating donors, such as alkoxide, amine, imine, thioether, phosphine, heterocycles, and so on. 3 Ideally, NHC-based chelating ligands could have their unique features beyond those of monodentate NHC in at least two aspects: i) enhanced metal-ligand interaction and consequently improving the stability of metal-NHC complexes, and ii) more readily tunable electronic and steric properties that enable handy control of the stereoelectronic environment of metal's reactive sites. These features have endowed chelating NHC-supported metal-complex-catalyzed reactions with large turnover number, rapid reaction rate, and high selectivity. 1-3 Several synthetic methods exist for NHC-based chelating ligands. 3 The most popular are the substitution reactions of donor-tethered electrophiles with imidazoles. As the substitution reactions require primary organic electrophiles, ring-closure reactions between donor-tethered amines and formal aldehyde or orthoformate could be an alternative route. The third method is the template-controlled synthesis that has been used mainly for macrocyclic NHC-based ligands. 4 These existing methods have enabled the preparation of most of the desired chelating NHC ligands. However, for chelating NHC with borane and silyl as the ancillary donors, which are potentially very useful ligands as inferred from the success of boraneand silylphosphine ligands in transition-metal chemistry and catalysis, 5,6 the conventional methods might be invalid because of the inherent challenge of installing Lewis acidic boranes or silanes with nucleophilic carbenes in the same ligand scaffold. 7In this article, we introduce a new synthetic method for chelating NHC ligand scaffolds, namely postfunctionalization, by utilizing the reactivity of cyclometalated NHC complexes toward organic functionalities (Scheme 1). This method is effective for the preparation of novel donor-functionalized chelating NHC ligands, including borane-and silyl-functionalized NHC ligands, on metal's coordination sphere, and thus could directly furnish structurally well-defined metal catalysts for organometallic catalysis.
Functionalizing NHC Ligands on Noble Metal's Coordination Sphe...