Organo-mediator enabled electrochemical transformations

Abstract

Electrochemistry has emerged as a powerful means to facilitate redox transformations in modern chemical synthesis. This review focuses on organo-mediators that facilitate electrochemical reactions via outer-sphere electron transfer (ET) between active mediators and substrates, offering advantages over direct electrolysis due to their availability, ease of modification, and simple post-processing. They prevent overoxidation/reduction, enhance selectivity, and mitigate electrode passivation during the electrosynthesis. By modifying the structure of organo-mediators, those with tunable redox potentials enable electrosynthesis and avoid metal residues in the final products, making them promising for further application in synthetic chemistry, particularly in pharmacochemistry, where the maximum allowed level of the metal residue in synthetic samples is extremely strict. This review highlights the recent advancements in this rapidly growing area within the past two decades, including the electrochemical organo-mediated oxidation (EOMO) and electrochemical organo-mediated reduction (EOMR) events. The organo-mediator enabled electrochemical transformations are discussed according to the reaction type, which has been categorized into oxidation and reduction organic mediators.