Unstrained Carbon-Carbon Bond Cleavage

This Focus Review presents recent developments in the cleavage of CC bonds in organic molecules. Significant progress in CC activation, including the development of a variety of new synthetic strategies, has contributed to the development of this field over the past few decades. Transition-metal-mediated CC bond cleavage has been shown to be a quite efficient process and several elegant metal-free methods have also recently been developed. Strained rings have been widely used in CC cleavage transformations; however, unstrained CC activation has increasingly caught the attention of organic researchers, which inspired us to clarify the developments in this field.