A one-pot synthesis of N-sulfonyl-2-alkylidene-1,2,3,4-tetrahydropyrimidines via a highly selective and copper-catalyzed multicomponent reaction of sulfonyl azides, terminal alkynes and a,b-unsaturated imines has been developed. The a,b-unsaturated imine substrates could be generated from amines and a,b-unsaturated aldehydes in a one-pot process. The procedure is concise, general and efficient.Keywords: ketenimines; multicomponent reactions; tandem reaction; tetrahydropyrimidines Ketenimines are nitrogen-containing heterocumulenes, which can participate in a variety of organic reactions, [1] such as nucleophilic addition reactions, [2] radical addition reactions, [3] [2 + 2] and [4 + 2] cycloaddition reactions [4] and sigmatropic rearrangements.[5]Previously, we [6] and several other groups [7] developed the Cu-catalyzed three-component reactions of sulfonyl azides with terminal alkynes and a number of nucleophiles. The reactions involve a copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddtion (CuAAC) and the generation of a ketenimine intermediate. Phosphoryl azides could also serve as a high-yielding type of azide to participate in the reaction.[8] These multicomponent reactions are versatile with regard to the substrate scope and the synthetic applicability. On the basis of these results, we anticipated that the ketenimine intermediate A (Scheme 1), which was in situ generated from terminal alkyne 1a and sulfonyl azide 2a, could react with a,b-unsaturated imine 3a through a nucleophilic cyclization to give tetrahydropyrimidine 4aaa and/or azetidin-2-imine 5aaa, respectively. Since the formation of azetidin-2-imines via the reaction of the ketenimine intermediate with imines has been reported by Whiting and Fokin, [7e] we systematically optimized the reaction leading to the six-membered product and investigated the applicability of this method to a variety of terminal alkynes, sulfonyl azides and a,b-unsaturated imines. Herein, we report the details of this work.Exhaustive studies of the reaction conditions for the synthesis of 4aaa from terminal alkyne 1a, sulfonyl azide 2a and a,b-unsaturated imine 3a showed that CuCl (Table 1, entry 1), CuBr (Table 1, entry 2), and CuI (Table 1, entries 3-14) could catalyze the reaction to result in a mixture of the six-membered product 4aaa and the four-membered product 5aaa, Scheme 1. Copper-catalyzed three-component reaction of alkyne 1a, sulfonyl azide 2a and imine 3a.