Recent applications of catalytic metal-mediated carbocyclizations in asymmetric synthesis

Catalytic transition metal mediated transformations enable a variety of novel bond constructions and open up exciting new possibilities for synthesis. To date, a relatively limited number of these reactions have been used as key strategy elements in the asymmetric total synthesis of structurally complex natural products. This review examines several recent applications wherein the subset of transition-metal-catalyzed reactions, metal-catalyzed carbocyclizations, defines the key retrosynthetic transformation in the synthetic plan. The applications chosen and analyzed so as to highlight their efficiency, brevity and intrinsic elegance of design and are placed in context by comparison to complementary classical approaches to the target structure.