N-Heterocyclic Carbenes (NHCs) are now recognized as ubiquitous and powerful ligands in organometallic chemistry and catalysis as well as excellent organocatalysts on their own right. Whereas the research in this domain is still largely dominated by imidazol(in)-2-ylidene type carbenes, we recently developed a new generation of NHCs whose archetypal characteristics is the presence of a functionalized backbone, i.e. malonate, enolate, enamine or imidato unit, as integral part of the heterocyclic framework. We present here some original features of the six-membered NHCs maloNHC  and imidNHC .This includes for example: i) the access to zwitterionic complexes, ii) the possibility to achieve a real time tuning of their electronic properties after complexation, iii) an ambidentate behavior favoring the generation of staggered polymetallic architectures.

Backbone-functionalized N-heterocyclic carbenes

244th National Meeting (2012)

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