Weinreb amide based building blocks for convenient access to various synthetic targets

N-Methoxy-N-methylamide, popularly known as the Weinreb amide (WA), has served as an excellent acylating agent for organolithium and/or organomagnesium reagents and a robust equivalent for an aldehyde group. The stability of the WA functionality, its ease of preparation, the scalability of its reactions and its predictable reactivity are the key features responsible for its prominent use in several synthetic endeavors by the chemists world-wide. The development of WA-based building blocks and synthetic equivalents for interesting synthons has been a long drawn pursuit initiated in nineties and through this mini-review accomplishments in this direction, with particular emphasis on the building blocks, developed recently in the last three years are summarized.