Recent advances in Cu-catalyzed carbonylation with CO

Transition metal-catalyzed carbonylation has emerged as a powerful and versatile strategy for the efficient construction of complicated carbonyl-containing molecules from simple chemical feedstocks in the past decades. Although many transition metals, especially noble metals, such as Ru, Rh, Pd, and others, have been applied successfully for these transformations, non-noble metal Cu-catalyzed carbonylation has shown a lot of advantages in terms of its low cost and toxicity. In this review, recent advances and contributions in Cu-catalyzed carbonylation using CO as the C(1) source were summarized. A variety of easily accessible substrates were converted into valuable carbonylated products including ketones, esters, amides and other products. The synthetic strategies described in this review provided an alternative greener option for catalytic carbonylation. Further studies and developments in this field would be inspired in the future.