Unsaturated four-membered N-heterocycles: From synthesis to applications

The ubiquity of strained motifs in drug discovery has recently witnessed a large regain of interest, as such scaffold can be used to modulate the properties of drug candidates. Unsaturated N-containing four-membered heterocycles present unique opportunities to access functionalized azetidines, which play an essential role in pharmacological studies. Even though those unsaturated patterns have been much less reported than the corresponding saturated versions, the consequent impact that those structures could have on molecular design with implementation of strained modules deserves to be summarized. In this review, synthetic accesses to substituted azetes, 1-azetines and 2-azetines are depicted, as well as their involvement in further transformations.