Ring Expansions of Activated Aziridines and Azetidines

Abstract

Facile construction of small and normal-sized, or more precisely, four to seven-membered aza-heterocyclic ring systems is always a challenging yet rewarding task for the synthetic organic chemists. Fortunately, activated aziridines and azetidines provide a direct and convenient access to this coveted molecular architectures through several elegant ring-expansion approaches. This chapter presents some of the illustrative and contemporary examples to demonstrate the synthetic diversity and efficiency of the ring-expansion strategies of activated aziridines and azetidines towards a vast array of small to normal-sized aza-heterocyclic moieties.