Transition‐Metal‐Catalyzed Cyclization of Alkenyl Iodide

Abstract Alkenyl iodide, as an essential precursor and structural unit in organic synthesis, has been widely used in the synthesis of natural products, pharmaceutical pesticides and functional materials. The high reactivity of the C sp 2 −I bond enables the formation of a C−M bond through oxidative addition, followed by subsequent transformations of the C−M bond to create new chemical bonds. A variety of valuable scaffolds, in particular the cyclic motifs, could be achieved via designing and synthesis the corresponding alkenyl iodide, which makes this strategy to be a hot topic in synthetic chemistry. In this paper, the recent progresses of transition metal‐catalyzed cyclizationof alkenyl iodides are summarized, and the possible mechanisms for most transformations are described in detail.