Harnessing Radical Chemistry via Electrochemical Transition Metal Catalysis

Jiaqing Lu; Yukang Wang; Terry McCallum; Niankai Fu

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2020.101796

Harnessing Radical Chemistry via Electrochemical Transition Metal Catalysis

iScience. 2020 Nov 11;23(12):101796. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2020.101796. eCollection 2020 Dec 18.

Authors

Jiaqing Lu^{1

2}, Yukang Wang^{1

2}, Terry McCallum³, Niankai Fu^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Molecular Recognition and Function, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
³ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.

Abstract

The merger of transition metal catalysis and electroorganic synthesis has recently emerged as a versatile platform for the development of highly enabling radical reactions in a sustainable fashion. Electrochemistry provides access to highly reactive radical species under extremely mild reaction conditions from abundant native functionalities. Transition metal catalysts can be used as redox-active electrocatalysts to shuttle electrons, chiral information to organic substrates, and the reactive intermediates in the electrolytic systems. The combination of these strategies in this mechanistic paradigm thus makes the generation and utilization of radical species in a chemoselective manner and allows further application to more synthetically attractive enantioselective radical transformations. This perspective discusses key advances over the past few years in the field of electrochemical transition metal catalysis and demonstrates how the unique features of this strategy permit challenging or previously elusive transformations via radical pathways to be successfully achieved.

Keywords: Chemistry; Electrochemistry; Molecular Electrochemistry; Organic Chemistry; Organic Synthesis.

Publication types

Review