Advances and challenges in user-friendly alkyne metathesis catalysts

Alkyne metathesis (AM), the cousin of ‘noble' alkene metathesis, has attracted rapidly growing attention within past 20 years and been widely used in synthesis natural products, functional polymers, shape-persistent molecular architectures. Given some excellent reviews recent years, this article will not provide a comprehensive review catalyst development wide applications AM, but rather focus on rational design catalysts, substrate structures, reaction conditions that meet requirements certain pathways (e.g., cyclooligomerization, polymerization, self-correction) make catalytic systems more user-friendly practically useful operating air with long lifetimes broad scope).